Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Herbert Hess

undergraduate curricula. While there is some common ground among mostundergraduate programs, there is little agreement on any universal form or focus for a graduateprogram. For both established and new programs, a topic set for undergraduate instructionappears to be fairly common and will be shown in this paper, along with the content ofsupporting laboratories, examples of projects, and a list of textbooks. The place in thecurriculum occupied by power electronics is then described and ideas for improving that placeare proposed. Finally, some trends that may influence power electronics instruction are notedand explored.General Curriculum Power electronics instruction is ordinarily found within an energy conversion portion ofthe electrical

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert W. Nowlin; Rajeswari Sundararajan

-enforced through a series of mini-projects and a major final projectin which students learn to apply their VHDL knowledge on a commercial grade VHDLsimulator. Another benefit that this course has engendered is that several of the graduatestudents have used their knowledge of the language to incorporate it as either a major orsupplemental portion of their masters' projects. INTRODUCTION The microprocessor and with it the PC has invaded every business and many homes.Many designs today are incorporating embedded processors or their first cousins, themicrocontroller. Even the old standby analog world is becoming more and more digital. Thepressure on designers in industry today is to design products and bring

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

David B. Beyer

. A solid core of mathematics and science, development of oral andwritten communications skills, social science, and humanities are incorporated into the program.ProcedureThis curriculum will be implemented in a project-centered approach, in a facility best describedas a studio environment. There is to be no differentiation between lecture, recitation, andlaboratory. Projects and activities will be the vehicle of instruction as opposed to the standardlecture and separate laboratory. All activities associated with a course will be conducted in thesame room. The room will have computer terminals and equipment available for anyconstruction or assembly required for projects. The core technical support topics of mathematics,science, and

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Sharon Zelmanowitz

Session 3251 Incorporating Political, Social, and Legal Issues into an Environmental Engineering Course Sharon Zelmanowitz United States Coast Guard Academy 1. IntroductionEnvironmental Engineering is largely driven by the political and social forces that shapeenvironmental legislation and that influence the feasibility of environmental projects. As such, itis essential that environmental engineering be taught in the context of these issues rather than asa purely technical subject with no social or political relevance

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

John K. Brown

-faceted projects will structure the semester.During its first six weeks, students working in pairs will conduct the “Research Interview Project”(RIP). Under the project students choose a specific discipline of engineering (most choose theirprospective major), they conduct library research on that topic, and they interview an engineer inthat field. The interview and ancillary library research form the basis for a number of furthercomposition and speaking assignments. The RIP will help arm students with the perspectiveneeded to declare their majors.The second major project, tentatively called “Perspectives on Engineering” (POE), will occupy thelast eight weeks of the semester. For the POE project, each discussion section will break downinto five

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Roman Kuc

, logic gates, computer hardware and software, measuring informationusing entropy, information coding and encryption, information transmission and informationmanipulation. EElOl includes a hardware and software project. For the hardware projecteach student implements a bean counter that counts a student-specific number of beans.The real success of the course is the software project that involves writing a personal WorldWide Web page and developing a Web page for a Yale-affiliated organization. Having takenthe course, students feel that they have an appreciation for the digital information artifactsthey encounter on a daily basis. The joys and tribulations of teaching EElOl are discussed.IntroductionThe problems with teaching science and

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Andrew S. Lau

: • It goes beyond ‘green engineering’ to discuss ethics, diverse cultural critiques of technology, and the politics of technology. • It is a technical elective and requires a significant group design project. • It qualifies as a ‘Diversity-Focused’ course and considers three specific cultural groups and their attitudes toward technology: feminists, the Amish, and Native Americans. • It makes use of collaborative groups throughout the course and requires considerable writing and speaking assignments.BACKGROUNDThe course evolved from several other courses taught by the author since 1984, including anIntroduction to Energy Technology course which made use of Jeremy Rifkin’s

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Mark A. Shields; John P. O'Connell

analyzing theconcept and design of an engineering device or system. Likewise, students may expand theirIndustrial Readiness by visiting engineering and manufacturing companies or by assessing the Page 2.333.2potential impacts of a novel device's cost, reliability, and safety. And students may sharpen theirCommunication Skills by researching a technical subject and compiling a professional annotatedbibliography or by explaining a complex technological topic in terms that non engineers mightunderstand. The intention is to support each attribute with a variety of experiences as well as tohave students work on projects that provide multi-attribute

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Brian S. Mitchell

added and removed since the inception of the course.For example, linear regression was covered the first year, but was removed in subsequent yearssince essentially the same material is covered in Stoichiometry. Experimental design wasintroduced, including factorial analysis, but was removed in 1996 to make room for moreengineering economics and an expansion of the design project. One-hour lectures on safety andengineering ethics are also incorporated as time allows. The majority of the class, however, isdevoted to the five areas described above. Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences byMendenhall and Sincich1 is currently the textbook for this course.Descriptive statistics, probability fundamentals and probability distributions are covered

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

M. Hossein Hariri

Session 3513 A Case Study in Stoichiometry Course Using Excel and Power Point Presentation M. Hossein Hariri Department of Chemical Engineering Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Terre Haute, IN 47803 AbstractProduction of syngas from coal was considered as a case study project for thestoichiometry course. In this case study we showed the students how to divide a complexprocess such as above to smaller single units as the first step. The flowsheets of eachsingle unit was drawn on a

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Deran Hanesian; Angelo J. Perna

programs haveworked with the authors in numerous “research” projects. These experiences have beenrewarding and fulfilling to both constituencies.IntroductionNew Jersey Institute of Technology is an inner city urban institution located in Newark, NewJersey with a social, economic, and academically diverse student body consisting of 5007undergraduate and 2830 graduate students. The undergraduate population is approximatelycomposed of one third (women, Hispanic, and Afro-American) minority.NJIT has a long history of outreach programs for elementary through college level students withmany originating in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry over the past 30plus years. It is therefore not unusual to find departmental faculty being

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

William W. Durgin

, therefore, more like an industrial setting than an academicone. Only two engineers and a technician were involved and only a few high school students -just enough to provide a pool of drivers - were involved. This same model was essentiallyutilized in the second year as well.In the third year, WPI sought to fully utilize its project based educational program by havingsenior engineering students design and fabricate the robot. High school participation wasexpanded to include the Massachusetts Academy of Science and Mathematics, an on-campustwo-year high school. A single faculty member provided leadership and high school facultybegan to become involved. The robot design was divided into three portions, with anundergraduate project team responsible

Conference Session

Integrating Design in Electrical Engineering Curriculum (1232)

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

David J. Ahlgren, Trinity College

Session 1232 CPLD-Based Design in the Introductory Computer Engineering Course David J. Ahlgren Trinity CollegeINTRODUCTIONDuring the last three years the emphasis in ENGR221L--Digital Circuits and Systems, theintroductory computer engineering course at Trinity College, has shifted toward the increaseduse of VHDL and complex programmable logic devices (CPLD's). This evolution hasencouraged team projects that employ top-down design and concurrent engineering approaches.Working student designs included a single-chip stepper motor

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert L. Avanzato

Session 2520 Fire-Fighting Robots To The Rescue Robert L. Avanzato Penn State Abington Abington, PA 19001AbstractA project-based mobile robotics course has been designed for freshman and sophomore honorsengineering students at the Penn State Abington campus. The unique feature of the course is thefocus on designing an autonomous mobile robot to be entered in a national fire-fighting robotcompetition at the conclusion of the course. Teams of engineering students have each designed,tested, and debugged a mobile

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas G. Boronkay; Janak Dave

, introduction toANSI standards, dimensioning and tolerancing, fits, etc. In this sequence students are assignedan individual design project which they must complete from conceptual ideas to final workingdrawings. They also do assembly drawings and bill of materials as needed for their designproject. Since students have not taken Statics or sophomore level Mechanics of Materialscourses, they are not required to perform any strength computations.The four credit hours Mechanics of Materials I and II courses are 3 hour lecture per week and atwo hour laboratory session per week. The lecture component is traditional strength of materials,such as stress, strain, Mohr’s Circle, normal and bending stresses, beams in combined loadingand beam deflections, etc

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard S. Marleau; John Bollinger; Jeffrey Schowalter

the faculty of the entire College ofEngineering. The entire cost of this structure was met with alumni gifts of cash donations andcorporate gifts in kind. It provides a valuable and elegant hands-on on-line experiment for ourstudents. It has also begun to provide a focal point of cooperation and team projects with Page 2.375.1students in the arts.Students have been involved in programming computers that control the system since theconstruction personnel finished their work in the fall of 1994. The student involvementcontinues to grow, with them suggesting and implementing extensive additions to the systemoperation, a good part of this

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Taggart Smith

, engineering managementcame into its own as an important discipline. Former technical specialists had to becometechnical managers of people, as well as projects and technology. In short, simply havingcutting-edge technology was not enough to keep America on the forefront of business and Page 2.174.1industry; managing that technology and the resources required to maintain it became important--thus, an increased attention to engineering management."Engineering and Technology Management is the discipline addressed to making andimplementing decisions for leadership in existing and emerging technologies and their impactson interrelated systems. Its focus is

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael Khader

asynchronous formats is underway. Until now samplesfrom these distinct modes of deliver are statistically limited and more experiments areneeded to prove how viable these options of learning are. We believe the jury is still outon the effectiveness each individual mode of delivery. We present an alternativeexperiment that builds on the strength found in each of the synchronous andasynchronous modes.Introduction NJIT has a strong distance learning program that is being active for the past tenyears. Within the program there are a number of developments under way including thevirtual classroom, computer mediated learning, and the multimedia interactive lab-courseware. The focus of the project being presented is the integration of both

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Elizabeth A. Eschenbach

Session 2553 Using Peer Evaluations for Design Team Effectiveness Elizabeth A. Eschenbach Humboldt State UniversityAbstractAll Humboldt State University Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE) students arerequired to take ENGR 111: Introduction to Design. The course has no prerequisites andrequires students to work in teams of 3 to 5 students on a 10 week long design project. An houra week is spent on team building skills during the first 4 weeks of the semester. During the fifthweek of the semester, the design project and the design teams are assigned.Three weeks into the

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Cal Caswell; Mel I. Mendelson

work, meeting the project goals, and completing assignments ontime. Initially, no exams were given in the course. Page 2.242.2 Competitive Materials Products Manufacturing Customer Product Concept Preliminary "Look-Alike" Markets Needs Specifications Sketches Design Prototype Cost Product Systems Level Selection

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Neda Fabris

Session 2392 Laboratory Workshop for Mothers and Daughters Neda Fabris California State University, Los Angeles ABSTRACT During the last two years I have organized and conducted two six week workshops for female highschool students and their mothers at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), to awakentheir interest in engineering careers. In this paper I am describing the project and discussing theresults obtained. INTRODUCTIONIn an increasingly technology-and engineering-oriented

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Kenny Fotouhi

SESSION 3226 LASER OPERATED UTILITY CART M. Fotouhi University of Maryland Eastern ShoreAbstract The objective of this undergraduate student project was to design a laser remote-controlled utility cart. The intent was to design and build the cart from discrete electroniccomponents and mechanical parts utilizing a multitude of engineering disciplines theEngineering Technology program offered at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. The cart was required to perform the following motions; going forward, going inreverse, turning right, turning left and stopping. These

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Nicholas Tsoulfanidis

, from a mistake,and move on with better planning. Page 2.403.2 All these items mentioned here cannot be present in the normal classlecture. Of course the instructor may provide examples of research projects,describe the process, the successes and the failures. But, we all know thatdescribing some activity is not the same as actually doing it.III. Connection between research and design Everybody in engineering is talking about design these days. Students, weare told, should be exposed to the design tasks from day one. Well, the researchexperience is a perfect conduit, a perfect bridge leading to design. Let meremind you of some the

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

James L. Neujahr; Herbert Seignoret; Gary Benenson; Ed Goldman

from the ECSEL Engineering Coalition and the New York CityCollaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (NYCETP), a pilot program at City Collegehas been working to motivate a group of engineering students to consider teaching as a career.The origins of this project are described in Benenson, et al (1995), and more recent reports haveappeared in Panitz (1996) and Florman (1996). The 15 participating students are serving as Page 2.165.2teaching assistants in exemplary design- and inquiry-based classroom settings at BrooklynTechnical High School (BTHS). These include classes in Physics, Math and MechanicalEngineering, which have been the

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Patrick L. Walter

Session 2259 Rocket Payload Load Assessment and Motor Performance- An Instrumentation Challenge Patrick L. Walter, Ph.D., P. E. ASEE/Senior Design Lecturer-Texas Christian University AbstractA complete design experience encompasses many facets including: specificationinterpretation, project management, proposal writing, preliminary and final hardware design,communications, supplier/vendor relations, testing, and human interactions. All of thesefacets are contained in the Capstone design experience in TCU’s new engineering program.The first class from

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Ronald Matusiak; David Andruczyk; D. Steven Barker; Stephanie Goldberg; Ilya Grinberg

applications used in a variety of industries.Stepper motors are a major component of many robotics applications. The complexity of anyengineering system’s structure depends on many factors. Examples of these for the design ofstepper motor (SM) applications are: 1) the level of the technical progress in the particularapplication, 2) manufacturing technology requirements, 3) safety and environmental factors, 4)equipment and machines used in the process, 5) economic considerations. The systems approachis imperative in that it coordinates the elements of a SM application, the elements of otherengineering applications of the project as well as the elements of the involved economicinfrastructure.1 The diagram which illustrates the coordination between these

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

William H. Sprinsky

degrees are ABET accredited.We recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Curriculum (ILI) grant. Themajor thrust of implementation reflects the revolution caused by technology in civilengineering and survey. We give each student not only the theory but also actualexperience with the projects and equipment that are the "bread and butter" of civilengineering practice. Laboratories in cartography, photogrammetry, surveying and civilengineering are designed to integrate experiences in this new technology.In the area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the merger of information fromdifferent sources, often in different formats, is the norm in civil engineering technologypractice, using GIS-based systems. We must recognize and keep up

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas R Phillips

Session 3260 North American Engineering Education & Academic Exchange: -- Canada, Mexico, the United States -- Thomas R Phillips, ABET/FlPSE Project Consultant Managing Director, Collegeways Associates (USA)From 1993 to 1996 the author served as ‘External Evaluator’ for the Regional Academic MobilityProgram (RAMP), a multilateral exchange program run by the Institute of International Education(IIE). RAMP has brought together 26 institutions in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, movingover 200 students in its first three years. However, only about 12% of the exchanges

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Ronald E. Yoder; D. Raj Raman

to thecurricula, however, this is not practical; with 135 semester hours in our undergraduate curricula,our goal is to reduce, not increase the number of credit hours in the program. The strategy that weadopted two years ago was to link two “unrelated” single-semester design courses through acommon design experience, thereby offering an in-depth design experience to our soil and water-, processing-, biological-, and food-engineering students.This strategy was suggested by an invitation to compete in the Third Annual Padnos DesignCompetition. The Padnos Competition is open to senior design projects using innovativeengineering solutions to solve problems in an environmentally responsible way. Entries consistof a design report, executive

Collection

1997 Annual Conference

Authors

Gregory M. Dick

each term. A typical project might involve: • The generation of a signal which is corrupted with random noise • The design of a filter (or several) to remove the noise from the signal • The analysis of the filtered signal to quantify the effectiveness of the signal processing system (filter).MATLAB - a Big Step ForwardStudents benefited significantly from the programming exercises outlined above. Studentresources (i.e., time) are finite. The investment of time to build tools in Fortran diminished theamount of time they could devote to experimenting with different signal processing techniques. Page 2.161.2This problem