BRIDGE2 Project

When I looked at traditional engineering curricula, I saw a gap. We are producing excellent technicians, but arewe producing adaptive leaders? To bridge this gap, I turned to a concept called Vertical Integration.

This project is developed in collaboration with Dr.Presentacion Rivera Reyes,

Assistant Professor at Department of Engineering Education at UB .

Student Learning Objectives (SLOs)

...In addition to learning course engineering principles that will depend on the choice of the project

SLO 1: Leadership and Adaptive Management

ABET SO 5: Lead and Manage

Students will effectively apply adaptive leadership principles to guide a multi-level team (graduate/undergraduate), practice resource allocation, and adjust team strategies in response to unexpected project interventions.

SLO 2: Teamwork and Professional Roles

ABET SO 5: Work Effectively in Teams

Students will function effectively on a diverse team (gender, race, nationality, and professional track) , establishing goals, planning tasks, and meeting objectives while understanding and performing their assigned hierarchical role (managerial oversight for graduate students; design execution for undergraduate students).

SLO 3: Communication and Presentation

ABET SO 3: Communicate Effectively

Students will communicate technical information effectively, both orally and in writing, to different audiences (e.g., technical reporting to the instructor; oral persuasion to stakeholders; written progress updates to team members).

SLO 4: Ethical Responsibility and Stakeholder Analysis

ABET SO 4: Recognize Ethical Responsibilities

Students will recognize and analyze ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations (e.g., transportation planning history), making informed judgments that consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts.

SLO 5: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Awareness

ABET SO 2 & SO 5: Diversity and Inclusion

Students will improve their awareness and understanding toward DEI issues , specifically through required social and professional diversity while building their teams.

SLO 6: Project Management and Accountability

ABET SO 2 & SO 5: Project Management

Students will apply project management processes, including setting project timelines and submitting mandatory weekly progress reports, to ensure project completion and team accountability.

What is Vertical Integration in Education?

In the business world, "vertical integration" usually refers to a company owning multiple stages of its supply chain. In education, we use it to describe merging different levels of the educational ecosystem—bringing together students who wouldn't normally interact.

For this project, we implemented Vertical Integration in Engineering Education (VIEE). Instead of keeping graduate and undergraduate students in their separate silos, we created a unified "company" structure within a course projects. This creates a unique ecosystem where students can practice mentorship, leadership, and project management in a safe, yet realistic, environment.

How Joined Project works

To make this work, I linked two specific courses at the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering (CSEE):

The Workforce: CIE 439 (Transportation Systems Analysis) This is a Junior/Senior undergraduate core course. These students act as the "design engineers." They are learning the technical principles of network analysis and design, but in this project, they also learn to report to a manager.
The Management: CIE 538 (Advanced Transportation Systems Analysis) This is a first-year graduate course. These students are seeking careers in transportation planning and engineering. In our VIEE model, they act as the "Project Managers." Their job isn't just to do the math—it's to oversee the design, analyze demand, lead and coordinate multiple undergraduate teams, and synthesize results.

Project about Themselves and for Themselves

The challenge with this activity / educational intervention is to develop the set of problems that can simulate a real industry project (or is one), and have a role for both graduate and undergraduate students that match course objectives.

In our pilot, the teams were tasked with designing a bicycle lane network to connect the UB North Campus with nearby residential areas.

Project Features

Structure

For the research purpose, undergraduate students are spited in two groups and then form teams. Part of the students, who choose to collaborate (we made it a choice), created a team that consisted of one graduate pair (the managers) and 5-6 teams (depends on the year of the experiment) of undergraduate students (the designers), four students each. Undergraduate students who choose not to collaborate, just formed teams of four members.

Roles

The undergraduates focused on the design for specific residential zones. The graduates were responsible for the "big picture"—combining results, performing demand analysis for the whole area, and ensuring their team delivered on time.

Points of Interaction Outside of the Project

Before VIEE activities, graduate students were tasks with their own project (project 1 in the diagram below) where they needed to explore student mode choice. This included creating the survey, collecting data, conducting statistical analysis and present the results. Important:

- Data was collected from the students in the undergraduate course.

- Presentation was hold during one of the undergraduate classes and served as a motivation for the merged project.

- Final presentation for the second project, graduate students also gave to the undergraduate students giving all of them the opportunity to see impacts of their work on the whole system.

Curveball

To test / train student adaptability, we introduced "interventions"—unexpected changes (Bike to School University campaign) that forced teams to pivot and adjust their designs mid-project, just like in real life.

Great opportunity to utilize jigsaw educational strategy

Every student in the undergraduate and graduate team is supposed to perform specific duties: collecting and analyzing data, writing reports, developing simulations, etc.

This structure, in large classes (like CIE439) and in such Vertically Integrated activities, creates a great environment for the Jigsaw educational approach.

In this approach, the instructor works with each group of team experts separately (for example, offering an extra hour on data analysis techniques), allowing students to later share those tools and insights with teammates.

Graduate students can be coached on leadership and team-building basics, report writers can attend special sessions on document processing and formatting rules, and extra sessions can be designed for simulation leaders.

Course structure CIE439_CIE538_CIE539 - Frame 5.jpg

Course Activities and Points of Interaction

Measuring Success

For the pilot project we chose survey used in this paper. Students from all groups did self-evaluation in the beginning of the course and in the end. This allowed us to measure student progress by comparing two groups before and after the intervention (project participation).

Stevens, J. D., & Lang, D., & Handley, M., & Park, J. J., & Mittan, P. (2021, July), Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Undergraduate Engineering Leadership Development Minor on Graduates Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37107

CG: Collaboration Group of Undergraduate Students

NCG: Non-Collaboration Group of Undergraduate Students

Most Pronounced Intervention Advantage (Cross-Cultural Competency)

The largest comparative advantage for the CG over the NCG was observed in 'Cross-cultural/global competencies'. The CG's mean change (0.430) was over three times higher than the NCG's mean change (0.141), strongly suggesting the VIEE's diversity requirements were effective

Emotional Intelligence Gain

The CG achieved a high mean gain in 'Emotional intelligence' (0.592), whereas the NCG's gain was much lower (0.352), suggesting the experience of leading and regulating team conflict enhanced this skill for collaborators

Communication Skills Gap

The CG demonstrated substantially higher mean growth in 'Communicate effectively' (0.606) compared to the NCG (0.409), supporting the VIEE focus on structured reporting and presentation requirements

Teamwork

Anomaly

'Work effectively in teams' showed the lowest mean gain for the CG (0.181), while the NCG's gain was significantly higher (0.309). This lower gain by the VIEE group might reflect the actual challenges and conflicts inherent in the highly structured, diverse, and multi-level teams.

Pilot results are promising - What is Next?

I am planning to continue joining this two courses during Spring semester, collect data, and improve the activity. Here are immediate plans:

- Assign collaboration and non-collaboration group randomly to reduce self-selection bias. It can be the case that better outcome for CG is due to predisposition to education, so desire to volunteer to collaborate with graduate students.

- Add objective and longitudinal metrics: undergraduate student performance in Capstone project during senior year, and employment after graduation for both graduate and undergraduate students.

Challenges: Before you choose to use VIEE in your classes, read this!

The implementation of Vertically Integrated Engineering Education (VIEE) introduces several instructional challenges for the faculty.

I. The primary challenge is the increased workload for the instructor(s), as the design requires managing two separate course curricula simultaneously and coordinating the interactions between undergraduate and graduate cohorts .

II. A second major difficulty lies in developing suitable, complex project ideas that are both challenging for graduate students (acting as project leads) and manageable/relevant for undergraduate students (acting as design teams), while mirroring a real-world industry setting .

III. Finally, a significant pedagogical hurdle is developing a fair and appropriate grading scheme. This is complicated by the differing responsibilities (design vs. management/oversight) across the two student levels, and it becomes even more challenging if the intervention includes a research component requiring a comparison of collaboration (VIEE) groups against non-collaboration (non-VIEE) groups within the same course .