Wednesday
11
March 2026
2:30 - 4:00 PM IST
Location
Room 300, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Learning Through Making: An Innovative Approach to Engineering Education
Arts and Sciences Research Seminar Series
Aditi Kothiyal
Assistant Teaching Professor
Humanities and Social Sciences
IIT Gandhinagar
Speaker
Addressing the multidisciplinary and complex challenges facing the world requires engineering students to have more than conceptual knowledge. They need skills such as problem solving and design, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Further, so that their innovations create an equitable and just world, they need to understand and take into consideration the cultural, ethical, societal and environmental impact of their work. Recognising this, IIT Gandhinagar has designed several curricular initiatives to encourage its students to become socially, culturally, ethically and environmentally conscious engineers, capable of self-learning, creative problem solving and innovation. In this talk, I will give examples from my work at IIT Gandhinagar, where we are studying how people learn through design and prototyping. I will describe two studies where we investigate how project-based design and prototyping courses support the development of students' self-efficacy and an emerging integration between social sciences and engineering. I conclude by offering some guidelines for instructors on how to design and conduct such courses in their own contexts.
Speaker
Aditi Kothiyal
Aditi Kothiyal received the BE degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, in 2001, the MS degree in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2004 and the PhD degree in Educational Technology from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2019. From 2019 - 2022 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the founding Executive Director of the Joint Doctoral Program in the Learning Sciences between EPFL and ETH Zurich. She has been at IIT Gandhinagar since 2022 as an assistant teaching professor in the Center for Creative Learning and the Department of Humanities and Social sciences. She has authored/ co-authored 40+ articles in the areas of educational technology, learning sciences and engineering education. Her research interests are in investigating making-based learning strategies and designing novel technologies, such as educational robots, to support making-based learning among engineering students. Her PhD dissertation, investigating how engineers perform estimation, and designing learning strategies for engineering students, won the “IIT Bombay Excellence in PhD Research Award, 2019” and “Association for Educational Communications and Technology Award for Outstanding Student Practice of Educational Technology in an International Setting, 2019”. Her work investigating the pedagogical strategies of IIT Gandhinagar received the "Best Research Paper Award" at the The 52nd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI). She was a Guest Associate Editor in Digital Learning Innovations of the Frontiers in Education journal and the program co-chair of the Technology 4 Education, 2024 and 2025 conference.
