Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

J.P. Trudeau; Alan R. Klayton; A.L. Clark; Daniel J. Pack

provide students with anintegrated overview of the hardware along with opportunities to practice desired programmingskills.In this paper we present a case study of integrating a “large” project with an EE microcomputerprogramming course, which is required for all EE majors at the United States Air ForceAcademy. The objectives of the course are to teach: 1) assembly language skills; 2)microcontroller hardware; and 3) microcontroller input/output interfacing skills, i.e., interfacingexternal devices such as a LCD unit, switches, and sensors. Page 3.330.1 Figure 1. A photograph of a portable lab and a completed mobile robot.In the past

Conference Session

Impact of Information Technology on Engineering Education (3215)

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Tahar El-Korchi, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Paul P. Mathisen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Frederick L. Hart, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Tagged Divisions

Civil Engineering (CE)

unrestricted face-to-face communication between home and field teams. Studentperformance was assessed by evaluating quizzes, group presentations, and project reports.Interpretations of student performance in terms of personality and cognitive style indicators forboth the control and test groups indicated that effective group interactions are a key to thesuccessful completion of integrated projects in a distance engineering environment. Studentjournals and survey responses indicated that students found the introduction to remotecommunication technologies to be valuable. The results demonstrate the importance ofintegrating distance engineering applications and information technology into the undergraduatecurriculum.1. Introduction An increasing

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Edward C. Roche; David B. Van Dongen

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Mitchel Keil; Mary Beth Krysiak; Sam Ramrattan; Jorge Rodriguez

personnel from the Instruments Division at Georg Fischer-DISA(GF-DISA) have been working on the development of a TDT for chemically bonded sands.Sand molding is, by far, the most common casting process used in the United States. Accordingto the American Foundrymen’s Society (AFS), close to 90% of the annual castings produced (1)nationwide are sand castings . Such popularity, due in part to the high level of applicability thatsand casting offers, has resulted in many technical developments towards a more efficientprocess. For resin binder processes, which can be classified as: no-bake systems, heat-curedsystems and cold box systems, technological advances on the chemicals used for the binders andthe catalysts have

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard P. Long; Kandace Einbeck

1 Session 3561DEVELOPING EUROTECH German emerged as the best target for culture and language study in an internationalengineering program, and we had to make sure that industry would support such an initiative.From members of the Connecticut Legislature we learned of several enthusiastic administrativeofficers in industry and discussed the project with them. Letters of support from both thelegislature and industry accompanied the proposal that was prepared and submitted to the U.S.Department's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. EUROTECH receivedfunding of $250,000 to develop the program. Although Germany is the initial target

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Francis D. McVey; James D. Lang

this paper. Additional information on IUGREEE, its purpose, and activitiescan be found, for example, in Reference 1.Survey QuestionnaireThat SURVEY contained a listing of 172 skills, knowledge descriptors, and experiences thatwere grouped into the eleven ABET outcomes categories. The respondents were asked to rankeach in importance for an entry-level engineer on a scale of 1 (corresponding to very low) to 5(corresponding to very high). The survey also asked for importance rankings of the same topicsfor engineers with 3 to 5 years of experience. An example page from the survey is shown inFigure 1 where some of the 18 topics in the “ability to design a system, component, or process”category are shown. The checkmarks are used to show an example

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Michele H. Miller

toaccelerate the pace of curricular change. This paper describes the activities that comprised thisinternship as well as the skills observed to be most important. With a few exceptions, my list ofskills matches the lists derived from employer surveys. Based on these observations, myrecommendations for curriculum change are: (1) provide more opportunities for students todevelop the soft skills (for example, by requiring more practical team projects); (2) explicitlyteach process skills, such as problem solving and project management; (3) emphasize the basicsin engineering science courses and how to apply them to a variety of problems; (4) offer moresystems courses to help students deal with the complicated products and organizations they willencounter

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Ronald J. Bennett

change is globalization of business of all types.123 We constantly seeexpansion not only of sales to all areas of the world, but manufacturing and product developmentas well.1 Thurow, Lester, Head to Head, Wm. Morrow, 1992.2 Khosrowpour, M. and Karen Loch, “Global Information Technology Education: Issues and Trends.” Series inGlobal Information Technology Management, 1993.3 Yates, Loyd, “Management of Technology in the United States: An Overview of Selected Issues”, Journal of Page 3.337.2Studies in Technical Careers, V14(2), pp. 75-86, 1992. 2It is not a coincidence that globalization and

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

James H. Dooley; James L. Fridley

history of creating artifacts to meet society’s needs engineering is believed bymany people to be free of societal influence and “outside the checks and balances of socialorder” 1. Technical professionals are generally unprepared to understand or participate in socialrole and norm development that is critical to team success. Additionally, technical professionsare struggling to discover and develop new operating paradigms that are consistent withengineering being as much a social process as it is a technical process.Current SituationIncreasing external public, regulatory and special interest group participation in engineeringdesign comes at a time when the current generation of design engineers is least prepared toappreciate and accept non

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Carolyn L. Dull; A. George Havener

are given learning objectives,a tasking (to develop a plan for a manned research mission to Mars)1, and access to aninformation resource containing data and references on engineering, Mars, and problemsolving skills and tools. A series of mini-workshops and the information resource areused to initiate the problem solving skills-development. Initially, the informationresource was a collection of computer folders. Before long, however, the accumulation ofinformation in the folders made them hard to use, and during computer downtimes, theywere inaccessible.To improve the utility of the information resource, a web-page has been created. TheHomepage is shown in Fig. 1. Designed as a network of concept maps containinghyperlinks to information

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1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Gulcin Cribb

Session 1441 INFORMATION SKILLS TRAINING FOR ENGINEERS Gulcin Cribb The University of Queensland, Brisbane, AustraliaIntroductionThe 1996 review of engineering education in Australia "Changing the Culture: (1)Engineering Education into the Future" in discussing the changing focus of engineeringeducation, states that "the focus of engineering education will be on creating lifelonglearners, from early education, through undergraduate education to continuingprofessional education, and from generalist to technical specialist." This report alsoadvocates that

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Suzanne Keilson

Session 3592 Infusing a multicultural approach to education in the engineering and science curriculum Suzanne Keilson, Ph.D. Department of Electrical Engineering and Engineering Science Loyola College, Baltimore, MD 21210 keilson@loyola.edu Abstract Over the summer of 1997 I participated in a workshop for infusing multiculturalismacross the curriculum. The workshop was based upon guidelines established by the AmericanAssociation of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)1 and has been

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Dava J. Newman; Amir R. Amir

Freshmen Seminars [1] and Introduction to Aerospace and Design,which is the topic of this paper. Other students may be interested in aerospace engineering but areuncertain whether to select it as their field of study, while a third group of students desires someexposure to aerospace and design. The MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics first cre-ated the Freshman elective Introduction to Aerospace Engineering to assist students interested inmajoring in the field. To make the course more exciting, the design and construction of a modelblimp was integrated into the subject. Over the past three years (1995–1998) several innovations have been introduced in the courseand the name was changed in 1996 to Introduction to Aerospace and Design to

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Majdi Najm

courses described in this paper. An added uniqueness of these courses is thefact that they are taught mostly to professional graduate students at their work site.The product-based-learning approach used in some of these courses has been praised in manypublications (see references 1 to 4). Professor Leifer at Stanford University has described it asfollows [5]: “Direct experience is the learning medium of choice in our domain of higher education and parallels the fact that professional experience is the measure by which most engineers, scientists and other professionals are rated.... . Learning is best done by creating something, a product, that embodies our knowledge. This is product- based-learning”.A background of the degree

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Albert L. McHenry; Lakshmi Munukutla, Arizona State University

. It was established in the best interest ofstudents at Community colleges who wish to transfer to one of the three state universities inArizona. The State Legislature’s goal was to provide a seamless statewide articulation andtransfer system, including the process of transfer for both general education credits and forcurriculum major requirements. Therefore, the TATF’s intent is to reach consensus on a courseby course basis to assure that community college students may transfer to Arizona publicuniversities without loss of baccalaureate degree [1]. The task force members are representativesof faculty, academic administration, student services and chief executive officers.Arizona State University (ASU) and the Maricopa County Community College

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Douglas G. Schmucker

significantly inspired by the T4E teaching model, which was developed at theUSMA and at whose NSF-sponsored short course the author attended.Student data both before and after the implementation are included along with faculty assessments. Comments fromother assistant professors who have implemented various aspects of the model are also included as are the author'sanecdotes. In the three semesters of implementation, the author has observed improved student performance asmeasured by written exams in addition to positive student and peer evaluations.1. IntroductionOne challenge faced by the author since entering the engineering education profession has beenlearning how to use the lesson time as a catalyst for student learning rather than simply a time

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Kristopher Delgado; Hartono Sumali

Department at Purdue offers more than oneundergraduate program. The department offers the following undergraduate programs:1. Agricultural Engineering, which is subdivided into 1.a Machine Systems Engineering specialization 1.b Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering specialization2. Food Process Engineering.Students typically enter the programs after one year of General Engineering education. Programs1 and 2 have few upper division courses in common. Programs 1.a and 1.b are different mainlyin the elective courses. An instrumentation course in the department has to cater to the needs ofall the programs.Instrumentation courses at other institutionsCourses offered at some institutions in the US and other countries feature interesting

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Peter W. de Graaf; Michael J. Walker; Cameron Wright; Thad Welch

student has a collection of seeminglyunrelated facts and theories; the synergistic importance of these facts and theories is lost.This suggests that a “systems approach” to engineering topics might best serve to foster thedesired understanding in the student. The specific interactions of components and subsystemsand how they support the overall system gives the student a frame of reference. According to Dr.James E. Stice, one of the important factors in engineering education is to “create meaning” forthe student [1]. In other words, help the student to make sense of the concept, relate it tosomething else with which the student is familiar, and help the student to see how the concept isused in a system. Thus, the systems approach combines the new

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Yvan Champoux

is led to work together as a team. Indeed,the project is evaluated by the professors, and a global mark is obtained. This mark will countfor 20 to 30 % in each course. III. The third semester courses content (sophomore)Here are the courses that the students have to follow in the third semester. Remember that the120 students are in the same class and that they attend the same course at the same time. Note aswell that the Experimental Method is taught in this third semester.• Experimental Method in Engineering (3 credits)• Fluid Mechanics (3 credits)• Mechanics of Materials (strength of material) (3 credits)• Materials Properties (1 credit)• Initiation to Research (1 credit)• Mathematics for Engineer I (3 credits).The

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Swami Karunamoorthy; K. Ravindra

important feedback to the system as shown in Figure 1. In the beginning of this century, engineering curriculum was focused on training andlearning of various skills. After the world war, the focus shifted to engineering science and theemphasis was on education and knowledge. Now, the focus is on a balanced combination ofeducation and training to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge in Mechanical Engineering.In order to prepare the next generation of engineers with such attributes, the Accreditation Boardfor Engineering & Technology has developed a new set of guidelines with outcome-basedassessment, exposure to current industry practices and integration of design across thecurriculum

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Eric J. Addeo

degree to a graduate level Ph.D.program.1.0 IntroductionFor the purposes of this document, we define an information network as being comprised of twodistinct layers, as shown in the following diagram. Page 3.87.1Information Network. Layer 1 Services Examples: • Information Retrieval • Desktop Teleconferencing • Electronic Document Interchange End-User • Operations Support Systems End-User Layer

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1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Marjorie Davis; John Palmer; Helen Grady; Clayton Paul; Allen F. Grum

The Revised Curriculum Freshman Year Fall Semester Spring SemesterEGR 105 Intro to Engr 3 0 3 EGR 107 Intro to Engr Design 2 2 3EGR 106 Engr Tools and Tech 2 2 3 EGR 108 Professional Practices 3 0 3EGR 171 Calculus for Engr I 3 0 3 EGR 172 Calculus for Engr II 3 0 3EGR 171L Engr Analysis & Appl I 0 3 1 EGR 172L Engr Analysis & App II 0 3 1PHY 170 General Physics I 4 3 5 EGR 120 Engr Economics 3 0 3

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael Safoutin; Jens Jorgensen; Joseph A. Heim; Dale E. Calkins

Puerto Rico atMayaguez with Sandia National Laboratories. The first year of operation of the University ofWashington’s ILF is described including the successes and problems.1) Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership (MEEP) The Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership (MEEP), which consists of PennState University, University of Washington, University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, and SandiaNational Laboratories, was formed in order to provide a new, practice-based, manufacturing-oriented engineering curriculum. MEEP provides a new paradigm for the undergraduateengineering experience by providing a proper balance between engineering science andengineering practice. The partnership, with essential input from industry leaders

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Digendra K. Das; Atlas Hsie; Salahuddin Qazi

technological knowledge and planning perspectives in the critical area ofadvanced technologies in a competitive global environment [1]. The American Society for Page 3.89.1Engineering Education has endorsed the concept of a practice-oriented master's program. 1Another population to be served by this graduate program is faculty members at community andjunior colleges. Many of these colleges presently employ entry-level faculty in technicaldisciplines with only a bachelor's degree. These people are required to obtain a master's degree inengineering or engineering technology in order to be eligible for tenure

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

P. Gharghouri

Session 2520 Integrating a computer algebra software into the engineering curriculum: problems and benefits. P. Gharghouri Department of Mathematics, Physics & Computer Science Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.This paper describes how MAPLE, a symbolic computation software, may be used asan educational tool in the computation of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors whicharise, naturally, in the study of mechanical vibrations. Article 1 presents therationale behind the choice of MAPLE over DERIVE, MACSYMA andMATHEMATICA. Article 2 describes the specific context where MAPLE

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Alice Swanger

the learning that is required for revenue productionand the learning that is required for academic credit. This effort is a critical component of themandate that the National Science Foundation has given us. It assumes that the readeraccepts, at least for a moment, the premise that engineering is a practiced based professionwhose purpose is to contribute to the tangible form of some planned item.PEDAGOGYIt is sound educational theory that when a broad theoretical concept is learned in tandem witha rich specific context, the acquired knowledge is more readily transferable.1 The next time arelated, different specific context is encountered, the transition of the old knowledge to thenew context is both easier and faster than acquiring brand-new

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Steven Youra

Session 3461 Integrating Communications into Engineering Courses: Dimensions of a New Paradigm Steven Youra Cornell UniversityEngineering students must develop the ability to communicate effectively. To address this need,a growing number of engineering programs are integrating communications into technicalcoursework. Writing and other forms of presentation can be central to engineering education forboth pragmatic and conceptual reasons: (1) The ability to communicate effectively is crucial tothe success of engineering projects and careers

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

M. A. Mooney; K. K. Muraleetharan; H. Gruenwald; B. E. Vieux; Randall L. Kolar

from such programs often have poor computer and communicationskills. Our four-pronged curriculum reform effort to addresses these weaknesses. The elementsare as follows: 1) use a four-year design project, $Sooner City,# as a common theme for allundergraduate civil engineering courses; 2) introduce an alternative classroom format thatmimics the dynamic, team-oriented setting used by engineers and scientists to resolve difficultproblems, problems that are too large and too complex to be tackled by individuals; 3) couple Page 3.349.1team-learning with a pedagogical approach that is primarily project- and student-driven, alsoreferred to as $just

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Alice Agogino; Ann McKenna

1engineering and to engage students in engineering analysis, design and problem solving. Thesegoals were accomplished by designing lessons and activities that not only contain engineeringskills and content, but also are consistent with research described in the education literature. Thedesign of the course was influenced by two main areas of research in the education community;1) collaborative learning1 and 2) scaffolded knowledge integration2.Collaborative learning refers to students working together where they share and distribute theresponsibilities of ‘learning’. The students support each other through questioning and 3elaboration, providing alternative points of view, and

Collection

1998 Annual Conference

Authors

Zohrab Samani; Jorge Garcia