Work in Progress: TikTok Format Videos to Improve Communicating Science in Engineering Students

Communicating is a skill humans practice early in life, in which they struggle when trying to communicate feelings, perceptions, and even more complex ideas. Research shows that engineers struggle to communicate technical ideas, even more to audiences outside of such technical knowledge. There are many efforts to support the development of communication skills. This project aims to contribute to such a direction by getting engineering students to communicate simple ideas concisely to a broad general audience. Notably, the researchers included a communication project as class credit. For this, researchers asked students to make a 1 min video explaining an assigned class topic. The video is a TikTok-Style Video for Improved Science Communication Science that will be uploaded to a class account on social media, with the setting of “public audience”. A TikTok video includes specific characteristics such as being entertaining, catchy, and fun to watch videos. If one of the videos went viral, students will get extra credit in the class. This communication project was applied to three courses in civil engineering (Structures, Cost Engineering, and Construction Management), with a total of 55 students. At the end of the semester, researchers surveyed to learn students' perceptions and feelings regarding the assignment, and the challenges they faced making such a video. The results indicate students find short fun videos challenging to communicate a technical idea and practicing making one helped them to find new ways to communicate. The authors discuss the possible factors driving the results, and the next steps and explore the avenues academia could take to improve communicating science. Implications for research and practice are provided.