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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Micheal Parten; Heath Keene

systems along withthe high frequency of transmission makes it difficult to develop undergraduate laboratories that can beused to teach the needed concepts. Some teaching systems exist but cannot be easily tied to existingcommercial systems. Equipment to test and characterize these new commercial communicationsystems is complex and expensive.To overcome some of these problems, student projects can be developed using a PC-based system forsimulation and application. The PC-based system used in this example is LabVIEW, or LaboratoryVirtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, a graphical programming language developed by NationalInstruments. It is used extensively for data acquisition, instrument control and analysis.4 In thisexample, a communications

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Timothy Wheeler; Dr. Rose Marra; Dr. Jack Mitchell; Dr. Charles Croskey

and a BSEE from Cornell University. In addition to managing the SPIRIT program, he teaches SeniorCapstone courses and builds flight hardware in support of rocket payloads for the Communication and SpaceSciences Laboratory (CSSL) at Penn State.CHARLES CROSKEYCharles Croskey received a B.S. (1967), an M.S. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1973) in electrical engineering from ThePennsylvania State University. His research interests at CSSL involve the measurements of electrical properties ofthe stratosphere and mesosphere by rocket-borne payloads and microwave/millimeter wave radiometry ofatmospheric constituents. He teaches undergraduate courses in electronics and remote sensing at the graduate level.JOHN D. MITCHELLJohn (“Jack”) D. Mitchell received a B.S

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Raymond Laoulache; Nixon Pendergrass; Emily Fowler

describe how assessment provided feedback to help decision making.I. IntroductionAfter several years of development, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD)began a successful, integrated, first year engineering curriculum in September 1998. Thisnew program was called IMPULSE (Integrated Math, Physics and UndergraduateLaboratory Science, and Engineering). The new curriculum dramatically changed thefreshman year because it included• integrating multiple subjects• teaching and using teamwork among students and faculty• using technology-assisted classrooms to accelerate learning• using active and cooperative learning1• encouraging formation of a learning community of students and faculty• using rigorous assessment to evaluate and improve

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Carol Flynn; Robert Hesketh; C. Stewart Slater

, Inc.Staff. Daqbook/Daqboard/DaqPCMCIA User’s Manual. Biographical InformationC. Stewart Slater is Professor and Chair of Chemical Engineering at Rowan University. He received hisB.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Prior to joining Rowan he was Professor of ChemicalEngineering at Manhattan College where he was active in chemical engineering curriculum developmentand established a laboratory for advanced separation processes with the support of the National ScienceFoundation and industry. Dr. Slater’s research and teaching interests are in separation and purificationtechnology, laboratory development, and investigating novel processes for interdisciplinary fields such asbiotechnology and environmental

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Brett Gunnink; Kristen Sanford Bernhardt

; calculus-based physics; and general chemistry, (m) proficiency in a minimum of four major civil engineering areas, (n) the ability to conduct laboratory experiments and to critically analyze and interpret data in more than one of the recognized civil engineering areas, (o) the ability to perform civil engineering design by means of design experiences integrated throughout the professional component of the curriculum, and (p) an understanding of professional practice issues such as: procurement of work; bidding versus quality based selection processes; how the design professionals and construction professions interact to construct a project; and the importance of professional

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Clark; Lisa Comparini; Anthony Dixon; David DiBiasio

. The major new features were a restructuring and spiraling ofspecific chemical engineering topics around a framework of open-ended, team-based projects. Inthe following we will refer to the group that took the new curriculum as the spiral-taught and thetraditionally taught students as the comparison. Note that "spiral-taught" is a convenient term weuse that includes all the teaching and curricular changes implemented during the project, not justthe spiral topic structure.The spiral curriculum was delivered through a variety of channels including cooperative-groupprojects, traditional lectures, homework problems, in-class active learning sessions, interactivemultimedia learning tools, and laboratory experiments. To assure individual

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Ralph Staus; Henry Ansell

instructor out of class. However, such recognition did not show up strongly in theaverages of student responses; the average ratings for those activities remained low. HENRY G. ANSELL received a Ph. D. (Electrophysics) from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He wasemployed for 25 years as an electrical engineer by AT&T Bell Laboratories. Since fall 1987 he has been teaching atPenn State Berks Campus (now part of Penn State Berks-Lehigh Valley College). He can be reached athga1@psu.edu for questions or comments. RALPH V. STAUS received an MSEE from Drexel University, and is a registered Professional Engineer inPennsylvania. He has had 20 years of industrial experience, including 14 years in factory automation. He is now anAssistant

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sean DiBartolo; Linfield Brown; Chris Swan

that is not generally available throughtraditional course work or laboratory projects.IntroductionWhat is WERC? The Waste-management Education and Research Consortium (WERC) is aconsortium of academic institutions, industry, and government agencies partnering ineducational, research and outreach initiatives in the environmental field. Academic institutionsinvolved with the consortium are New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT),University of New Mexico (UNM), New Mexico State University (NMSU) and Diné College.The consortium offices reside at NMSU. Major industrial partners have included Westinghouse,Fluor Daniels, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO), Rust Geotech, Inc., and Phillips Petroleum. Majorgovernment contributors include the U.S

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas Rich

Laboratory. The completed arch exceeded their design load under actual testing to failure. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2 Testing to Failure of the 39-Foot Arch Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Page 6.679.5 Copyright ©2001, American Society for Engineering EducationIII. 1999-00 Project: Re-Design America’s First Water Powered WaterworksQuestions:* Where was the first powered waterworks in America?* Why wasn’t it in Boston, New York or Philadelphia?The answer to the first question is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (5). The answer

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

William Saunders; Donald Grove; Charles Reinholtz

research assistantship was funded by the NSFSUCCEED campus program under the "Vertical Integration of Mechatronics" project. That research focused onintegrating mechatronics into the undergraduate curriculum, as discussed in this article. Donald also worked as agraduate teaching assistant in the Mechatronics Laboratory. His academic studies were concentrated in the field ofcontrol systems and mechatronics. Donald Grove is now an employee of Pratt-Whitney’s Propulsion SystemsAnalysis group in East Hartford, CT.WILLIAM SAUNDERSWilliam Saunders is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. Duringthe Fall 1996 semester, he launched the first mechatronics course at Virginia Tech. That senior-level

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

James Nelson; Bernd Schroder

retention to be an attempt to erode standards. Alsonote that retention can mean “retain students within my engineering program”, “retain studentswithin the college of engineering”, “retain students at this university” or “assure studentscomplete an academic degree (not necessarily at this school)”. Given that funding decisions candepend on the number of students a certain program/college teaches or leads to graduation, thistopic is volatile to say the least.To make integration a reality it is necessary to understand the motivations and challenges ofother academic programs as well as those of the academic leadership. Open lines ofcommunication are a strong step towards this goal. We shall now describe critical steps in thedesign and pilot phase 1997

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Wayne Krause; Chenoa Jensen; CASEY ALLEN; Michael J Batchelder; Daniel F. Dolan

campus. These are: the Advanced ManufacturingLaboratory (AML) in Mechanical Engineering, The Injection Molding Laboratory in ChemicalEngineering, The Advanced Composites Laboratory (ACL) in Civil and EnvironmentalEngineering and the EE Prototyping Laboratory in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Eachhas industrial manufacturing equipment. The AML has a FADAL vertical machining center, a Page 6.699.2Bridgeport Romi CNC lathe and a Brown and Sharpe coordinate measuring machine. A Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Narayanan Komerath

maintain a high learning rate, and allows them to use what they learn, quickly. Supportmechanisms for the first year are integrated into the course through various techniques such asthe requirement to exchange knowledge and form teams. Through the initiative of several seniorprofessors, an experience base has been developed, sufficient to enable students in Fall 2000 todesign any one of several types of aircraft. Experience from this course is discussed, comparingvarious learning and motivating techniques with the expectations, capabilities and reactions ofthe students. In the first teaching of this course, it was verified that first year students alreadycame prepared with skills and interests to excel in many aspects. Since then, teaching has

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

James Menart; Elizabeth Johnson; Gary Kinzel

Session 3425 A Model for Multi-University Design Projects Gary Kinzel, James Menart, Elizabeth Johnson The Ohio State University/Wright State University/ Sinclair Community CollegeAbstractThis paper discusses the evolution of our approach to conducting multi-university designprojects in which teams of students at several different campuses collaborate on the designand manufacture of a product. Such projects teach the students about concurrentengineering and simulate a real-world setting. The projects teach product design anddevelopment, system integration, inter

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Lisa Lebduska; David DiBiasio

techniques to teach writing, it may be difficult for students to incorporate lessons fromthe humanities into their engineering coursework 5. Scientists may also lack the language andunderstanding of composition studies to teach the writing process effectively. Offering apedagogical balance between science and rhetoric is thus a challenging problem.Engineering schools have used various approaches to confront this problem of balance. AtRensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the chemistry department employed writing consultants fromthe Department of Language, Literature, and Communication to work with junior-levelchemistry majors on their lab reports in two required “writing intensive” courses. Theseconsultants met with chemistry faculty to discuss writing

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Wen-Whai Li; Charles Turner; Alfredo Martinez

have a knowledge ofcontemporary issues as they relate to engineering. There is evidence that many engineeringprograms do not perform well in these areas. Sustainable Engineering initiatives canprovide an avenue for improving performance.The College of Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) has developed aprogram for the teaching and learning of sustainable engineering concepts in each andevery engineering program. The departments impacted are Civil, Computer Science,Electrical, Materials & Metallurgy, and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. The programis the result of self-assessment at UTEP and has the support of a National ScienceFoundation initiative for Model Institutions of Excellence. The program is

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Shirley Holloway

curriculum redesign and implementation and to combine this activity with dayto day teaching and their own professional development.The keynote of NAIT’s mission, academic plan and business plan is to promote student successin this new global economy. Whilst surveys show that NAIT is maintaining an excellent recordof student retention, graduate placement and employer satisfaction, it is clear that true graduatesuccess will depend on preparation for continued learning and development. There must be achange from curriculum that emphasizes the here and now of existing jobs to one which providesa platform for further learning. Traditionally the content of individual programs at NAIT hasbeen set specifically for regional and national industry needs, with

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Naomi Chesler; Mark Chesler

male students with similar grades.17, 18Anecdotal evidence suggests many men find women students in engineering “unnatural” orunfeminine, marginalizing them through the use of pejoratives such as ugly, sexually deviant or“too busy to be attractive.”14 When these perceptions and related behaviors are acted out in theclassroom, hallways and laboratories, and tolerated by student peers, faculty and staff, they arereinforced in the lives of both men and women.These barriers and disincentives prevent young women from entering SME fields and contributeto the "leaky pipeline" of women in engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate level.14Thus, one technique for increasing the number of women who enter and stay in engineering is tocreate a

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Nicholas Cain; Julia McLees; Jason Bara; Gary Wnek; Bradford Crosby; Gary Huvard

somewhat nonintuitive solution. Increase the airflow during the summer! This wouldactually decrease the overall humidity to levels typical of the winter months by diluting themoisture added by the binder and combustion. In the limit, they correctly argued, the averagemoisture content would be just that of the inlet air if an infinite flow of air were used. Theirsolution, when implemented, would save the company the nearly 5 million dollars lost each yearto scrap in three plants. (“This mass and energy balance stuff really works, huh?” “Yes. Itreally works and so does all this other stuff I’ve been trying to teach you.”)Two weeks later, Brad and Nick presented their findings to a room full of enthusiastic plantpersonnel in an all-day consulting

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

John Johnston; Ed Dammel; S.K. Ramesh; Eric Matsumoto

Session 2326 A Simple Beam Test: Motivating High School Teachers to Develop Pre-Engineering Curricula Eric E. Matsumoto, John R. Johnston, E. Edward Dammel, S.K. Ramesh California State University, SacramentoAbstractThe College of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Sacramentohas developed a daylong workshop for high school teachers interested in developing andteaching pre-engineering curricula. Recent workshop participants from nine high schoolsperformed “hands-on” laboratory experiments that can be implemented at the high school levelto introduce basic

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas Hare; Roger Russell; Miriam Ferzli; Michael Carter; Yusef Fahmy; Eric Wiebe

and speaking.It is necessary, therefore, that those who are most able to help their students learn to think likeengineers should also play an important role in helping them learn to write and speak likeengineers. This places the responsibility back on engineering professors. Of course, the challengehas always been about finding time in engineering courses for teaching communication skills.One response to that challenge is to take advantage of the opportunities for teachingcommunication skills that already exist in the curriculum. While Wheeler 6 lists a number ofpossible venues for writing in the engineering curriculum, the most ubiquitous and yet the mostoverlooked is the lab report.Practically all engineering students take laboratory

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Steve Beyerlein; Dan Gerbus; Edwin Odom

a key- Page 6.202.1 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Educationring tool. Throughout the year student teams regularly interact with their graduate studentmentors on technical and team issues. This is facilitated by the layout of our new capstonedesign suite that includes a CNC equipped machine shop, assembly area, CAD laboratory,conference/study area, and graduate student offices. The team-focus and technical excellencepromoted by our program is illustrated in the video clip located athttp

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard Upchurch; Judith Sims-Knight

changed through actively assimilating knowledge—self-explaining, writing, interacting with others and with other ideas. The implications forteaching practices are enormous. In constructivist learning, students interact with each other andconnect what they are learning to their own experiences and knowledge, thus making theirlearning conceptually coherent and personally meaningful. The key teaching practices requireopportunities to reformulate and articulate newly found meanings. This activity is critical tosuccessful learning.Associated with the constructivist approach is a focus on helping students become aware of theirlearning and learning processes. This entails helping students develop a sense of how they knowwhat they know as well as what

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Thomas Stanford; Michael Aherne; Duane D. Dunlap; Mel Mendelson; Donald Keating

-century. This culture is predominantly based on a science-driven, basic-research model that findsits roots in policy developments arising out of the 1945 Bush report, Science: The EndlessFrontier. The reality, however, is that most modern industrial innovative technologydevelopment does not find its genesis in the research university laboratory. Hence, it is driven bythe everyday, nitty-gritty details of living in a complex world of markets, needs, opportunitiesand responses to complex social, technical and policy problems.13 Most “real world” innovativetechnology development occurs through a purposeful, systematic needs-driven process using thecreative engineering method.3,14Re-engineering ETL graduate professional education so that it is

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Vijay Arora; Lorenzo Faraone

transformedrules and responses to the realities of the competitive marketplace. A university, like any otherorganization refusing to respond to the needs of the dynamic world in a timely manner, canbecome a beautiful higher education museum if its brain bank does not respond in ways thatmatch the creative far-sighted vision of global leaders. New knowledge, new opportunities, newtechnologies to serve our teaching and administration, new industrial/business partners inresearch and innovation, and new institutional structures in advancing our mission are required inthe new economy. These elements can make dramatically a new engineering school responsiveto the needs of the twenty-first century workplace, while securing core goals and virtues in ahierarchical

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

James Masi

as esters and biphenyls, are quite unusual. Page 6.666.3The unique properties and the control of the chemistry leading to these properties make thesemethods excellent teaching and learning tools. A typical schematic of liquid crystal types isshown in Figure 2. At Western New England College and the Northeast Center forTelecommunications Technologies, laboratories have been developed involving four distinctproperties (and chemicals) of liquid crystal materials1. An overview of liquid crystal materialsand properties2 is given in the Appendix for use as a pre-lab lecture or as reference for thestudent and laboratory instructor

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Leah Jamieson; Edward J. Coyle; William Oakes

credits because they are expected to serve as thetechnical leaders on the teams and thereby take on more responsibility.Each student in the EPICS Program attends a weekly two-hour meeting of his/her team in theEPICS laboratory. During this laboratory time, the team will take care of administrative mattersor work on their project(s). All students also attend a common one-hour lecture given each weekfor all EPICS students. A majority of the lectures are by guest experts, and have covered a widerange of topics related to engineering design and community service. The long term nature ofthe program has required some innovation to the lecture series as students may be involved in theprogram for up to seven semesters and do not want to hear the same

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Anant Kukreti

numerous teaching awards, which include the Burlington NorthernFoundation Teaching Award, Regents Award for Superior Teaching, ASEE Midwest Section Outstanding TeachingAward, and the ASEE Fluke Corporation Award for Innovation in Laboratory Instruction. At University of Oklahomahe received the David Ross Boyd Professorship. Page 6.185.12 Figure 1. Sieving Apparatus used for the Microconcrete ProjectFigure 2. General Experimental Setup for Top and Seat Angle Connection Page 6.185.13 Figure 3. A View of the Test Setup for the Steel Connection

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Aaron C. Clark; Eric Wiebe

report on a survey of students enrolled in engineering design graphics courses at NC State University the Fall 1999 semester. The results of this survey provides a snapshot of how prepared students currently are to make use of computer-based instruction within and outside of traditional labs.I. IntroductionThe instruction of engineering design graphics has always been closely linked to technology.Whereas the technology used to be based on manual instruments such as compasses, T-squares,and triangles, in more recent years the tool of choice has been computer-based CAD systems.What has not changed at many institutions has been the centering of the engineering designgraphics curriculum around the on-campus laboratory. While the focus of the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Stephen Stafford; Rosa Gomez; Daniela Castaneda; Connie Della-Piana

academicprograms depending on their pre-college preparation, e.g. high school curricula, and theirgeneral orientation towards university studies. The problem of college preparedness maybe more acute on a commuter campus, where students may only remain on campus aslong as class hours and laboratories demand. UTEP’s student population is typical ofmajor urban universities, serving the academic needs of a regional, place-boundpopulation. Our students are also non-traditional from the standpoint that the majority areethnic minorities, first in their families to go to college, and balance their academic liveswith required part-time, and sometimes, full-time employment. Juggling so manyactivities often leads our students to minimize their time on campus, and