There are long-standing examples of how engineers’ education in probability and statistics has not been sufficient. This work presents a novel theoretical framework to help teach and study statistical variability. Using this framework, we developed an interview guide and deductive coding scheme to use in interviews with engineering students. Early results from these interviews support our initial hypothesis of a slight induced variability bias.

The emerging field of Public Interest Technology contains the seeds for an engineering practice that embodies the ethic of care and undergraduate engineering educational experiences in the mold of liberatory education. We realized these opportunities by creating an undergraduate, student-led public interest technology clinic. Using autoethnography, we reflect on our effort to create the clinic and find that we prioritized emotions and relationships, embraced slowness and deliberation, and claimed student ownership. These practices served to redefine engineering in ways that center care and equity, helping us create the inclusive and effective engineering and public interest technology educational experiences we wanted for ourselves.

Computing has a history of perpetuating injustices, a pattern that has only seemed to grow worse over recent years. These injustices are a direct result of computing's epistemic values and practices, which suggests the need for computing to adopt alternative epistemic values and practices, including sociopolitical awareness, reflexivity, humility, and an explicit commitment to justice. These are the central values of feminism, but while scholars have developed theories about how feminist values could reshape computing, there is a need for more research into how to practically integrate feminist values into computing practice. Additionally, given that computing education reinforces and reproduces the dominant computing culture, there is a need for further research to imagine how computing education could be transformed to teach developing technologists how to integrate feminist values into this practice. I conducted a small-sample, in-depth interview-based study to understand the experiences of people who are developing into or practicing as feminist technologists. Through my research, I identified six common characteristics of feminist technologists, including a commitment to care, awareness of power structures, practice of epistemic humility, application of systems thinking, and negotiation with the tensions in integrating feminist values. I also identified two common types of experiences that help develop people into feminist technologists: experiences that foster feminist consciousness-raising and experiences that positively model feminist values. These insights suggest alternative ways of understanding the development of feminist technologists as a continuous process, where being and becoming a feminist technologist is one and the same, that requires a foundation of emotional safety.

A series of paper handouts given to attendees of the "Olin Rising" opening day ceremony on May 3rd, 2003. Most are geared towards prospective students and their parents.

A scrapbook covering the history of Olin College, starting from 1997 and ending at 2005. The scrapbook contains photographs of student activities, faculty, and other aspects of Olin College life. There second half of the scrapbook contains several pages where Olin members contributed to a discussion about various topics by all writing on the page, similar to a yearbook.

Speech given by Lawrence W. Milas to the Olin Partners on August 23, 2001

Petition to the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education from the Olin Foundation about the incorporation of Olin College, as well as related correspondence.

A draft document containing the results of the strategic planning process at Olin College for 2004-2006. Includes a mission statement, long-term aspiration statement, and three strategic goals.

We see a misalignment between the engineering field’s constitutive-interests rooted in the reductionist sciences and the needs of the 21st century in the socio-political, environmental, and spiritual realms. Following Habermas’s critical theory, the knowledge-constitutive interest of the natural and reductionist sciences lie primarily in the manipulation of the physical world for the purpose of predictable and quantifiable outcomes by reducing the studied system to its smallest components. Such interests are unfit to understand and intervene in our world; a living world of dynamic complexity. We argue that a renewed science of holism will create the conditions for a critical engineering education that can mimic the properties of living systems to recreate a thriving existence for all living beings on this planet. In this thesis, we identify six loose web-nodes to draw a picture of a science for the whole:

(1) Natural phenomena such as emergence, self-organization, or autopoiesis acquaint us with the nature of nature. (2) The study of our world brings us closer to our cosmos’s mysteries, which naturally introduces spirituality to the holistic web. (3) Dynamically complex systems theory attempts to understand the relationships between parts of the system to make assumptions about future behavior or opportunities for intervention. Practices that are commensurate with the nature of reality are crucial for an effective engagement with living systems. Such practices include (4) methods for a co-creation of the future and (5) research and learning methodologies that embrace unpredictable emergence of insights and emancipate us from hidden oppressive power structures. (6) Lastly, a holistic science includes the reductionist sciences to analyze, predict, and control non-living, simple systems. Our hope is that a holistic science will re-shape engineers’ understanding to learn and interact with our world to recreate the nature of nature in our systems: a thriving existence for all.

Readers are invited to comment on the online version of the thesis: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C3SCRvH27EgcddZZr0pTxEqCUb41ksqJ/view

| Advisors: Linda Vanasupa, Benjamin Linder, Jonathan Stolk

For our Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Capstone project, we created and taught a STEM unit for fifth grade students. The goals behind this project were to learn how to plan and execute a cohesive unit as well as improve our knowledge and ability to teach STEM curriculum in elementary schools. Our unit ended up being a five week mission where students planned and built Mars rovers.

Project‐Based Learning (PjBL) has been shown to be an effective method to enhance student learning, particularly in science and engineering (S&E) fields. However, the implementation of a PjBL environment plays the deciding role in the students’ interest and learning outcomes. This paper presents a comparative study of two PjBL courses, Physics Laboratory and Engineering Design, which have similar intended goals and features but different implementation related to self‐direction and student autonomy. Classroom observations and interviews with both students and faculty are analyzed using Grounded Theory. Stefanou et al.’s framework of autonomy support within the PjBL paradigm is identified as a data source and is then used to analyze both courses. We further discuss the implications of the course goal implementations on student interest and affect, and argue for a more comprehensive PjBL model in introductory college‐level S&E courses.