Taylor Tucker is an engineering education Fellow at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She currently co-leads a collaborative human-centered engineering design integration project in partnership with the Grainger College of Engineering. She earned her undergraduate degree in engineering mechanics (BSEM) and master’s degree in curriculum and instruction (MSCI, Digital Environments for Learning, Teaching, and Agency program) from Illinois.
Tucker’s research primarily focuses on the promotion and development of collaboration skills and cognitive engagement in undergraduate engineering tasks. She has collaborated in designing and evaluating the implementation of ill-structured tasks in introductory engineering courses, with findings presented at conferences such as the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), the American Education Research Association (AERA), and the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). As part of her work at SCD, she also developed and deployed a team-based, weeklong human-centered design summer camp for high school students that guides campers in completing an introductory, hands-on design task. Her stake in the future of engineering education has been shaped by two underlying values: 1) ill-structured problem solving in design tasks that are both authentic to industry and able to address novel societal challenges and 2) relevant hands-on learning.
