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Application of 3-D CAD and 3-D Printing to RET Program to Enrich Engineering Design Education

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Maker Spaces in Design Education

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34152

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34152

Download Count

368

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Paper Authors

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Xinyu Liu Lamar University

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Dr. Xinyu Liu is an associate professor in Industrial Engineering Department at Lamar University, Beaumont, TX. Prior to joining Lamar in Fall 2007, Dr. Liu worked as a research engineer in Microlution Inc., a startup company dedicated in micro-manufacturing machine design and manufacturing. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He got both his MS and BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1999 and 1997, respectively.

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Xuejun Fan Lamar University

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Julia Yoo Lamar University

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Julia Yoo is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Teacher Leadership Graduate Program Coordinator at Lamar University. Dr. Yoo received her doctorate in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She also earned her M.A. degree in Program Evaluation at the same institution. She is a former elementary school teacher and has given numerous presentations at national, international, and regional conferences.

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Nicholas Andres Brake Lamar University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4326-7800

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Nicholas Brake is an Associate Professor in the Civil and Environmental Department at Lamar University. His research interests include engineering education, concrete pavements, fatigue and fracture of concrete material systems, the use of reclaimed materials in concrete systems, and wireless power transmission in concrete infrastructure. Dr. Brake received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University.

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Jiang Zhou Lamar University

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Dr. Jiang Zhou is currently a professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas. She received her Ph. D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, Maryland, in 2003. Her research interests include mechanical applications in microelectronics, biomechanics, system dynamics, and system optimizations, etc.

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Xianchang Li Lamar University

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Dr. Li received his Ph.D. degree from Clemson University in 1999 and now serves as a professor in the department of mechanical engineering at Lamar University in Texas. He is interested in research related to renewable and conventional energy system analysis, heat transfer enhancement, combustion optimization, emission reduction, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

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Dorothy Sisk Lamar University

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Dorothy A. Sisk, Ph.D., holds an endowed chair in education of gifted students at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Dr. Sisk is an international consultant focusing on leadership and creativity development. She was a professor at the University of South Florida, coordinating programs for training teachers of the gifted, and the former director of the U.S. Office of Gifted and Talented in Washington, DC. She currently directs the C.W. Conn Gifted Child Center at Lamar University, and teaches the courses for endorsement in gifted education. She received the Distinguished Leaders Award from the Creative Education Foundation (CEF) in 1989, the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) in 1983 and 1994, the Creative Lifetime Award from CEF in 1994, and was selected for the Hall of Fame Award of CEF in 2005. Dr. Sisk served as one of the founders and first president of the American Creativity Association, and president of The Association for Gifted and Talented (TAG), the Florida Association for Gifted (FLAG), and the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children (WCGTC), serving as their executive administrator, and editor of Gifted International from 1980-1990. She has conducted training sessions throughout the United States and internationally. Dr. Sisk is author of Creative Teaching of the Gifted, and Making Great Kids Greater; coauthor with Doris Shallcross of Leadership: Making Things Happen, The Growing Person, and Intuition: An Inner Way of Knowing; coauthor with E. Paul Torrance of Gifted Children in the Regular Classroom and Spiritual Intelligence: Developing Higher Level Consciousness; coauthor with Susan Israel and Cathy Block of Collaborative Literacy: Using Gifted Strategies to Enrich Learning for Every Student; and co-author with Michele Kane of Planting Seeds of Mindfulness. In addition, she has contributed numerous articles and chapters in books on gifted education.

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Abstract

Starting in 2013, however, Texas House Bill 5 and a new Foundation High School Program was established with an increasing requirement on the design and manufacturing, most of which is outlined in the Career and Technical Education (CTE) section of Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) Standard. This in turn necessitates more training for high school teachers who are in great need of learning the state-of-the-art design and manufacturing technology. In 2016, Lamar University (LU) at Beaumont, Texas was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site grant titled “RET Site: Incorporating Engineering Design and Manufacturing into High School Curriculum.” The goal of the project is to host 12 high school teachers each summer for three consecutive years to participate in engineering design and manufacturing research and then transfer their experience into high school curriculum. After the successful operations of two years, the LU RET program entered the third year in 2019. This year, we made two major enhancement in the RET summer program: 1) to center the workshop and research activities around the 3D CAD design and 3D printing, which are now readily available to most high schools, and have already made great impact on the design and manufacturing education; 1) to put more emphasis on the connection between the design and manufacturing research experience and the high school STEM course module development so that the participating teachers would not only have more hands-on research experience, but also be able to kick-start the develop the suitable course module for their students. In the six weeks’ program, five LU engineering professors provides morning workshop on six subjects and various research project. The first week we started with the 3D CAD design using Autodesk Fusion 360, which is powerful and popular CAD software commonly used in engineering design. In the following weeks, the teachers got the chance to see the application of the CAD and 3D printing applied in the following research projects guided by the five LU professors: 1) Dr. Liu offered workshops on computer integrated manufacturing systems, focusing on bridging the gap between design and manufacturing, taught the teachers how to use the same CAD platform Autodesk Fusion 360 to create cutting tool paths for CNC machines in order to manufacture the 3D CAD design. The topic of converting the 3D design file into a STL file format and feed into a slicing software to prepare the CAD design for 3D printing was also covered. 2) Dr. Brake led the teachers design a magnetic concrete mix that was used to manufacture a concrete CI core transformer for application in wireless power transfer systems. This work included drawing and printing 3D models to make casting molds for concrete casting. Designing and testing concrete CI cores under 60 Hz AC sinusoidal excitation to determine the dynamic magnetic hysteresis of the concrete transformer. This work could be implemented into a Physics course or an engineering course that places focus on interdisciplinary activities that include multiple disciplines working together- both civil and electrical engineering. 3) Dr. Fan asked the teachers design and 3D printed standard tensile specimen and use the specimen to test the tensile strength of the 3D printed materials. Various 3D printing conditions such as print direction, fill density, etc were used to study the impact of the 3D printing conditions on the achievable strength of the 3D printed parts. 4) Dr. Zhou led the project on synthesis and manufacturing of robots with legged walking mechanisms after delivering workshop on mechanism design and robotics. The workshops start with mathematics foundation for mechanism. Teachers were fascinated by how high school Geometry and Algebra knowledge can be applied to design a simple machinery. 5) Dr. Li’ workshops are on alternative and renewable energy, which cover three most important renewable energy resources: hydroelectric power, solar power and wind power. This is the only subject area where CAD and 3D printing was not directly used, but energy is very important aspect in engineering field, no manufacturing is possible without energy. The workshop broaden the participating teachers’ horizon on the grand energy challenge the entire world is and will continue facing.

Liu, X., & Fan, X., & Yoo, J., & Brake, N. A., & Zhou, J., & Li, X., & Sisk, D. (2020, June), Application of 3-D CAD and 3-D Printing to RET Program to Enrich Engineering Design Education Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34152

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