Expanding 1st year problem-solving skills through unit conversions and estimations

Rapidly evolving technologies have placed a challenge on engineers to become more innovative in their thinking and are driving an ever-increasing need for `complex problem' solving abilities. Educators need to ensure that all aspects of the curriculum are adequately grasped by students, but particularly foundational knowledge and concepts such as unit conversions. Enabling students to understand what units represent, the relationship between the different systems, and the procedural conversion processes are essential to adequately equipping engineering students to engage with higher level, complex problem solving. A useful analytical framework to aid educators has emerged in the shape of the Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) epistemic plane which differentiates between a phenomenon and its approaches. In this work a unit conversions and estimations online test is demonstrated as a tool to enable learning, and LCT as an analytical framework to inform teaching practice for the achievement of engineering competence.