Exploring Students' Engineering Thinking Skills Through STEM Project-Based Learning in Jukung Boat Design Equilibrium Concept

Abstract

Engineering thinking is one of the 21st-century skills because it emphasizes problem-solving through prototyping as a solution to problems. However, facts in school learning show that students have difficulty in several aspects of engineering thinking, such as dealing with complex problems and generating innovative solution ideas. STEM-PjBL learning can be used to develop students' 21st-century skills, one of which is engineering thinking skills. STEM-PjBL can also be integrated with regional local wisdom to preserve the fading local wisdom of the region. This research aims to explore students' engineering thinking skills through STEM-PjBL on jukung boats. This type of research is a case study with a qualitative approach. The data sources in this study are observation sheets of engineering thinking skills, interviews, and documentation of students' worksheet. This research explores engineering thinking skills consisting of 6 indicators, namely system-thinking, problem-finding, visualizing, improving, creative problem-solving, and adapting. The results showed that the majority of students showed poor performance in the system-thinking and problem-finding indicators. While some students showed very good at visualizing and improving indicators. Furthermore, some students showed good at the creative problem-solving indicator. In the last indicator, the majority of students showed good adapting. Based on the study's results, the conclusion is that through PjBL integrated STEM learning, students' engineering thinking skills show good on visualizing, improving, creative problem-solving and adapting indicators. While the majority of students showed poor performance on system-thinking and problem-finding indicators.