Interaction Description
I entered Daniels Hall room 341 at 5:00 pm on November 9th, 2015 to begin my observation of first year engineering students. The room was a class room with three rows of tables that spanned the room with one middle aisle with white walls and carpeted floor. At the front of the room there was a white board with a projector screen on either side and a tall desk in front that housed a computer and document viewer. On the projector screens a YouTube video was being played of large tesla coils being used to make music playing tunes heard in the popular Mario video games. As soon as one video would end a new musical tesla coil display would begin.
For the first forty-five minutes there were boxes of Domino’s pizza being served at the side of the classroom on paper towels. There were 66 first year engineers in attendance along with two Power America representatives and a lady present representing NC State. The female to male ratio in the classroom was 1:5 which is close to the average in the engineering workforce. Students were spread across the room pretty evenly with no one sitting in the front row of the classroom. Almost everyone was sitting in groups of two or three with the exception of two students sitting alone. Conversation was hushed and many were busy eating pizza. The discussion that was being had around me was in regards to signing up for the spring semester’s classes and which computer science classes were available to freshman. Students were dressed very casually sporting denim jeans and rain jackets while the Power America representatives were wearing bowties, sweater vests, and khakis and the NC State representative a skirt, blouse, and matching scarf. At 5:28 the NC State representative announced to the room that the presentation would be starting soon and encouraged students to eat more pizza. Five students used this as an opportunity to get seconds and more seats began to be filled in as more students arrived eventually filling in every seat in the back two rows and forcing two students to sit in the front row.
At exactly 5:30 the Power America representatives at the front of the room began introducing themselves and began their presentation. Conversation among students stopped and body positions shifted from facing one another in discussion to the front of the classroom. At 5:35 they began playing a video of President Obama speaking on the future of power being at NC State all of the students were watching the video with the exception of one texting on their phone and two still eating pizza. After the video ended the presenters returned to their PowerPoint slides and continued their presentation. At this point students were touching their hair and face and more students began to pull out their phones. There was a student slowly tearing up their Styrofoam cup, students shifting their weight on their elbows on the desk, and students going to get more pizza or throwing away their paper towels. The students were eager to partake in audience participation with the entire classroom raising their hands when asked if they had been to centennial campus, where NC State’s engineering buildings are located, and almost all of the students raising their hands again when asked who was from North Carolina.
The rest of the presentation included the presenters using a very specific and technical vocabulary throwing out terms such as “bidirectional power grid”, “slide rule”, “gallium nitride LED”, “silicon carbon crystals”, and “soldering”. While first year engineering students engaged in very little conversation among one another during the presentation. Their body language and actions were very typical of any given class room. Students were leaned back with their arms crossed or leaned forward resting their head on their elbows while finding distractions in their phones or by taking their pens apart and putting them back together, behavior common of any student-teacher setting.
