SCD Spotlight: Affiliate Matt Goodman

Shoutout to Senior Lecturer and SCD Affiliate Matt Goodman, who has been a champion of human-centered design in engineering education.

Goodman, who lectures in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MatSE), has worked with SCD’s Assessment and Research team to overhaul the MatSE capstone design course, evolving it from a one-semester standalone to a two-semester sequence (MSE 494, Materials Design Thinking; MSE495, Materials Design) and introducing human-centered design in early lecture content. Capstone teams also complete weekly progress reports in which they reflect on the human-centered design processes in which they engaged over the past week and articulate the tasks they completed that fit these processes.

“Design in engineering, and perhaps specifically in Materials Science and Engineering, can be a vague and nebulous idea,” Goodman said. “A challenge with design is that it requires divergent thinking, where practitioners must think about solution possibilities. By incorporating HCD, a framework is provided that allows students to utilize divergent thinking and realize that it is a fundamental skill necessary for design. The framework also provides guidance in what specific processes would drive the project forward by allowing the students to track their progress in a manageable and concrete fashion thought the different HCD spaces.”

Goodman also found a way to use the AR team’s HCED Mapping Tool in discussions with fellow faculty to organize course content for MatSE’s most recent ABET review. 

“The mapping of HCD processes and activities to ABET outcomes allowed me to precisely state how I am exposing and teaching students so they can obtain the desired outcomes,” he said. “I can then use the same or similar activities to assess the students’ progress on these outcomes and adjust or modify the curriculum accordingly. It allows for a very clear, evidence-based curriculum development, which is another aspect that is fundamental in ABET accreditation (continuous improvement).”

SCD’s collaboration with Goodman has resulted in a positive impact on students’ self-efficacy in design. Goodman used the AR team’s self-efficacy survey to track changes in students’ self-reported confidence levels across the five human-centered design taxonomic spaces over time.   Data analysis from his 2025 conference publication showed significant increases in students’ confidence between their pre- and post-test surveys, which were given at the beginning and end of the semester, respectively.

Capstone students’ surveys indicate improvement in all HCD spaces over time (graph reproduced from Goodman et al., 2025). 

Goodman has presented this work at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference.