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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Watkins; John Sullivan

Session 2149 USING INTERDISCIPLINARY LABORATORY EXPERIENCES TO TEACH TEAMWORK SKILLS. William A. Watkins, John P. Sullivan Purdue University, West Lafayette, INAbstractWith the integration of Total Quality Management (TQM) and World Class Manufacturing(WCM) philosophies into today’s industrial environment, educational institutions have beenasked by industry to incorporate more activities designed to develop skills related to working inteams. As a result many academic institutions have implemented team based laboratoryactivities. Since most industrial teams include

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sema Alptekin; Reza Pouraghabagher; Patricia McQuaid; Daniel Waldorf

students in the most effective and realistic manner. This objective, ofcourse, is in line with the "hands-on" philosophy of education at Cal Poly. Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Facilities Bldg. 26, Room 110 Industrial Partners Graduates Teaching Factory of Cal Poly Production Planning and Control Center Bldg. 26, Room 110 CAD Laboratories

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Thankappan Pillai

Session 1526 Computer Interfaced Teaching Laboratory for Science and Engineering Majors Thankappan A.K. Pillai University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, La Crosse, WI 546011. IntroductionThis paper describes a Workshop Physics style laboratory for first year Physics-Engineering Dual Degree majors at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse (UWL) 1.With the support of an NSF grant2, we have established a computer interfaced physicslaboratory to go along with the calculus based introductory physics course. This courseuses networked Microcomputer Based Laboratories (MBL)3 to acquire

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sheldon Jeter

Session 2526 Teaching the Principles and Practice of Uncertainty in the Undergraduate Laboratory Sheldon M. Jeter Georgia Institute of TechnologyINTRODUCTION Uncertainty is the estimate of the confidence interval for a measurement. Somereasonable estimate of the uncertainty is almost always necessary. For one example, an estimateof the uncertainty is necessary to assess the reliability of measured data for use in design oranalysis. An uncertainty estimate is also needed to evaluate the confidence interval when themeasured value is to be compared

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Jordan; Debbie Silver; Bill B. Elmore

Session 2326 Using Laboratories to Teach Engineering Skills to Future Teachers William Jordan, Debbie Silver, and Bill Elmore Louisiana Tech UniversityAbstractDuring the 1999-2000 academic year, the authors created and offered to elementary and middleschool pre-service teachers a course on engineering problem solving. This course was designedto build the knowledge base and strengthen the confidence of future teachers when working withscience, engineering, and mathematics principles using laboratory-based activities as thefoundation for learning.Using the theme “Our Material World

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Laura Genik; Craig Somerton

Session 2526 A Multivariate Calculus Approach to Uncertainty Error Estimation in Teaching Laboratories Laura J. Genik, Craig W. Somerton University of Portland/Michigan State UniversityAbstractIn the engineering profession, a key component of any experimental work and its results is thepresentation of the error associated with those results. Many undergraduate engineeringprograms have moved away from a standard instrumentation or measurements laboratory, andhave also eliminated the laboratory components of the basic physics and chemistry courses.These changes could lead

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Scott Fogler; John T. Bell

Session 2213 Virtual Reality Laboratory Accidents John T. Bell, H. Scott Fogler University of Illinois at Chicago / University of Michigan at Ann ArborI. Background & IntroductionEvery year there are far too many laboratory accidents, in undergraduate teaching labs, graduateresearch labs, industrial testing labs, medical labs, and others. These accidents continue to occurin spite of the most modern safety policies and training practices. Of course some accidents cannever be avoided, but far too many occur because people have become complacent or forgetfulof the safe

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Stephen McKnight; Gilead Tadmor; E Everbach; William E. Cole; Michael Ruane

Multimedia Session 2793 Teaching Computing to Engineering Freshmen Through a “High-Tech Tools and Toys Laboratory” S. W. McKnight, W. Cole, G. Tadmor, E. C. Everbach, and M. Ruane Northeastern University / Swarthmore College / Boston UniversityAbstractFreshman engineering courses in computing applications and programming often lackapplications that are sufficiently engaging without being overwhelming. Program outputs andgraphics within the reach of beginning students are often woefully primitive compared tocomputer graphics that are available in commercial gaming software. The students’ lack ofbackground in

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William T. Lin; Richard Pfile

Session 2526 Using Network Analysis Software To Teach the Internet Protocol Stack in the Laboratory Richard E. Pfile, William T. Lin Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IndianapolisAbstractThe stacked protocol concept is difficult to understand and to many students it’s an abstractnotion. Although students are masters at memorizing tasks the different protocol layers perform,they don’t grasp fundamental concepts of how the protocol stack functions in computercommunications. Message addresses reside at different layers in a stack, several stack

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael Warren; Jay Porter

Session 3547 A New Laboratory Curriculum Focused on Teaching Mixed-Signal Testing Concepts Using Low-Cost Test Equipment Jay R. Porter and Michael R. Warren Texas A&M UniversityAbstractAs the density of integrated circuit technology continues to increase, many commercial devices arecombining both analog and digital electronics onto a single chip. As the complexity of these chipsincreases, familiarity with testing mixed-signal devices is essential for the successful entry-level engineer. This paper discuss a laboratory curriculum being developed at

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Vladimir Nikulin; Victor Skormin

advancements come at the right time: the amounts of knowledgeexpected at the baccalaureate and master’s levels show drastic increase. The system ofengineering education is especially vulnerable to the effects of Internet, global communicationsystems, computers, etc. However, there is one area in engineering education that is stilldominated by classical teaching/learning methodology: the laboratory. This could be easilyexplained: the purpose of an engineering laboratory course is to teach future engineers to interactwith the “real hardware” in all its imperfection. Any attempt to replace the “real hardware” in astudent laboratory with the most elaborate simulation software can result in the loss of realismand prevents students from gaining important

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Jim Henry

thesystems.ConclusionThere are a number of aspects of remotely operated experiments in engineering labs that arequite valuable. There are opportunities for expanding and improving the technology.AcknowledgementsSupport from the Center for Excellence in Computer Applications at the University of Tennesseeat Chattanooga, the College of Engineering and Computer Science and taxpayers in the State ofTennessee is gratefully acknowledged.JIM HENRYDr. Henry is a professor in the area of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee atChattanooga. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been teaching engineering for 27 years. Heis interested in laboratory development for improved learning

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Anthony Tzes; Hong Wong; Vikram Kapila

to enablestudents to work on laboratory experiments beyond the traditional three hours per week, throughthe Internet. It consists of i) a web site that connects students to online-experiments controlledand monitored through the Internet, ii) detailed specifications and operation manuals of variousexperiments, iii) prerecorded videos of selected experiments, iv) live streaming video of online-experiments, v) a chat window to communicate with other students and to form Internet-basedremote learning communities, vi) email addresses of professors and teaching assistants, and vii)links to miscellaneous control related web sites. These features of the MPCRL provide studentswith a wealth of information and virtually unlimited remote access to the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sanjeev Arora; Masoud Naghedolfeizi; Jim Henry

. in engineering from the University of Tennessee. He is a principal in the development of modern laboratoriesat Fort Valley.SANJEEV ARORADr. Arora is in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Fort Valley State University. Hecompleted his Ph.D. in experimental atomic physics from the University of Delaware. He is also a principal in thedevelopment of modern laboratories at Fort Valley.JIM HENRYDr. Henry is a professor in the area of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee atChattanooga. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been teaching engineering for 27 years. Heis interested in laboratory development for improved learning

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Ralph Tanner; Johnson Asumadu

under a NSF funded project.An electronics laboratory was developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)11 wherevirtual instrumentation is used. In the RPI lab, the electronics circuits were already wired. Allthat the students do is collect data for analysis.The goal of our project is to establish Web-based instructional modules and other visualmultimedia that will enhance the quality of basic electronics and circuits education at WesternMichigan University (WMU) and Tuskegee University (TU), and to promote active teaching andlearning among students and faculty. Just as it has been proven that a web-based laboratory canbe used to link together educational facilities that would otherwise be unable to support alaboratory, the RwmLab will

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

David Probst

results of such efforts in writing and orally. My ownexperience was very much this way when I entered industry after undergraduate school.Although I had completed degrees in physics and electrical engineering, I had done very littleexperimental design, I had never learned to solder, and I had done very little formally to developmy communication skills. This caused considerable stress during my first few months on thejob. When I began teaching and had the opportunity to participate in revising a two-coursesequence in advanced physics lab, I was eager to try to create a laboratory sequence thatprepared students more adequately for professional life after graduation than my ownundergraduate education had prepared me. The course sequence that was

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Muniram Budhu

testing.Sample preparation requires experience and skill, and it is often a tedious operation.Sometimes a teaching assistant or the instructor will prepare the sample for the students and Page 6.169.4set it up in the apparatus prior to laboratory class. In the virtual laboratory, the studentProceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & ExpositionCopyright Ó 2001, American Society for Engineering Education”extracts a soil specimen using a virtual soil extractor and prepares it to set up in the virtualapparatus. Three of the steps of the virtual sample preparation process are shown in Figure 3.The student is

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Bertram Pariser

Session 1148 Teaching Critical Thinking Bertram Pariser TCI, The College for TechnologyAbstractThis paper describes the challenge of Teaching Critical Thinking to a class of physicsstudents at TCI, The College for Technology in the fall semester of 2000. Besidesachieving its goal of helping students to think critically, teaching critical thinkingprovides fun and students find it quite rewarding. Students are encouraged to work oncreativity throughout the semester, in class, in laboratory experiments, on homeworkproblems and in the creation of examinations. 1

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Hakan Gurocak

Material World, an Internet-Based Educational Environment", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1998.7. Hart, H. and Kinnas, S. A., "Developing Web-Based Tools for Environmental Courses", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1998.8. Hamann, J. and Muknahallipatna, S., "Distributed Instrumentation and Computation: A Look at What’s Put on the End of the Internet", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1998.9. Carr, R. et. al., "Enhancement of Freshman Engineering Laboratory Through Remote Web-based Experiments", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1998.10. Davis, W. and Heim J., "Using the Internet to Leverage Undergraduate CIM Laboratory Resources", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1996.11. Henry, J., "Controls Laboratory Teaching via the World Wide Web", Proc. ASEE Annual Conf., 1996.12

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Carlos Ortiz

Session 2526 Development of an Environmental Laboratory and Laboratory Experiments for a Civil Engineering Technology Program Carlos A. Ortiz , Ph.D. Southern Polytechnic State UniversityPopulation growth and infrastructure requirements demand good understanding of environmentalengineering related issues from civil engineering technology graduates. Consequently, back in1998 the Civil Engineering Technology (CET) Department at Southern Polytechnic StateUniversity (SPSU) started activities to improve the existing environmental laboratory, so theschool could provide the

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Charles Knight

Session 2366 DEVELOPING A 21st CENTURY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING LABORATORY CURRICULUM Charles Knight, University of Tennessee at ChattanoogaAbstractElectronic instrumentation and computer data acquisition has revolutionized the experimentallaboratory. Universities with limited funding face major challenges in upgrading theirlaboratories. Industry advisors tell us they expect our engineering graduates to have modernlaboratory skills. Many engineering faculty members do not possess the modern skills requiredto develop and/or teach laboratory curriculums required in the 21st century. This situation hasdeveloped

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Edward Fisher; Anton Pintar; Kirk Schulz

knowledge of unit operations, chemical reactions, process safety, and process control. 8. Learn to use software tools typically used by Chemical Engineering professionals.All of the course activities are geared towards meeting these objectives.Course StructureThe course meets one day per week in two sections from 8 a. m. to 5 p. m. The 8–9 a. m. timeslot is normally used for lectures and for the Safety Meetings. Lecture topics include details onthe laboratory proposal and on the final report, presentation of sample calculations, and erroranalysis. There typically are 90-100 students in the course. Three faculty members supervise theexperiments with one serving as the course coordinator. Two graduate teaching assistants and alaboratory

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Marilyn Smith

Session 2602 The Virtual Laboratory: Technology Enhancement for Engineering Education Marilyn Smith, Narayanan Komerath School of Aerospace Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0150AbstractThis paper continues to report on research that seeks to define the proper role of technology toenhance learning in engineering education. The first application addressed was that ofaugmenting traditional classroom lectures so that classroom and homework time becomes

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas Grover; Terry Parker; Robert King; Joan Gosink

words in the title of this paper relay the uniqueness of theMEL approach: “multidisciplinary” and “sequence”.1.2 Sequential Laboratory Courses at Other UniversitiesSeveral universities teach sequential laboratory courses focused on topical depth. For example,Texas A&M University connected a course in microprocessors and a course in electronicinterfacing in a sequence4. Both have three hours of recitation and two of laboratory each week. Page 6.96.1Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering EducationIn another example

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Gilbert; Cynthia Finley

encourages the students to be interactive with each other and with the instructor. To accomplish this, the teaching assistant talked with the student groups during the laboratory, checking their work Page 6.475.3 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education Civil Engineering Problem: An ambulance must be able to travel between a residential area and a hospital after an earthquake. Students analyze the reliability of the roads during simulated earthquakes based on the construction cost of the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Stanislaw Legowski

be currently widely used bydesigners of electronic systems. It was also important that laboratory systems with theseintegrated circuits do not need many external components and may be assembled by the studentas a part of the laboratory experiment. Other conditions were that the laboratory experiments hadto be inspiring and an excellent laboratory manual would be available. It was possible to achievethese goals because the EE 4330 course had quite a good laboratory prior to the Fall of 2000.The new laboratory was evaluated as superb by the teaching assistant and the students. Thispaper describes the place and content of the Electronic Systems Design course in the electricalengineering curriculum. The laboratory is a very important part of

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Gary Crossman

laboratory. The student then analyzes the data, preparesperformance calculations and curves and submits comprehensive reports to the instructor.A comprehensive final examination testing the expected outcomes of the course is beingdeveloped and implemented. Performance studies thus far indicate that the video-tapedlaboratory is an effective method of teaching this laboratory course.I. IntroductionOld Dominion University has been involved in distance education for more than 15 years. TheDepartment of Engineering Technology, through its civil, electrical and mechanical engineeringtechnology programs offers upper level programs to more than 50 remote students in Virginia

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Zbigniew Prusak

Session 2526 Laboratory Experiments in Process Design and Optimization Zbigniew Prusak Central Connecticut State UniversityAbstractThis paper describes an approach used to teach various aspects of manufacturing process design,optimization and improvement via hands-on experiences in laboratory experimentation. Theexperiments were conducted using a very low cost apparatus for launching projectiles. Theyutilized several basic physical principles such as elasticity, gravity, sliding friction, and fluidfriction. Various geometric characteristics of the apparatus and the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Johnson

. FIGURE 2ConclusionA team of senior Mechanical Engineering students have designed, ordered equipment,constructed and calibrated a psychrometric test facility. They have designed and carried outexperiments to evaluate their design. The equipment is now used regularly in the MechanicalEngineering Laboratories at the University of Tennessee.WILLIAM S. JOHNSONWilliam S. Johnson is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tennessee where he teaches coursesprimarily in instrumentation and the design of thermal systems. His current research involves direct-exchangegeothermal heat pumps and he serves as manager of the University of Tennessee environmental testing facilities.These facilities involve 4 environmental chambers where testing

Collection

2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard Behr; Christine Masters

laboratory-teaching concept,describes the seven MechANEX modules for a statics course, and summarizes results frompreliminary MechANEX assessments in the student user environment.Introduction‘MechANEX’ is a mini-laboratory combining comprehensive software analysis modules andmatched, bench-scale verification experiments to improve and enrich a sophomore-levelengineering mechanics course in statics. Developed as an extension of the “AN/EX” (ANalysisand EXperiment) laboratory1,2 used by civil and architectural engineering students in junior-levelstructural engineering courses, MechANEX combines a newly developed, easy-to-use, staticsanalysis software package with fully configured experimental setups designed for use withexisting AN/EX laboratory