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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

David S. Cottrell

, downloadableshareware from the West Point web site (http://bridgecontest.usma.edu). A newerversion will be released at a later date to support the actual competition, but the currentsoftware is quite powerful and, for the young budding engineer, very interactive andenticing. The software effectively guides the user through the design of a truss-typehighway bridge and includes – at an elemental level – all of the fundamental aspects ofdesign as defined in the ABET accreditation criteria. The projects are based on real-world scenarios; they are open-ended, permitting many possible solutions; and theyrequire formulation of problem-solving methodologies as well consideration ofalternatives and economic concerns relating to the finished project. The final

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Yaw Owusu

everybody to agree on where the project is going, and what it will Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Educationtake to succeed. Therefore, a strategy is needed for the team to succeed. The followingis proposed strategy that can be used as an integrated process planning approach toresolving team conflicts in a concurrent engineering setting:1. Fighting the elements: The traditional view of individual effort rather than cooperation must be eliminated. Specialists must learn how to work in a group and help each other.2. Bringing the team together: The team leader must have the support of top management. He or

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Terrence Freeman

information can be distributed instantly to widely different places at precisely the same time. That makes it unnecessary for people who must work together and share information to be physically located in the same place, and it makes it possible for many more people to be involved in working on a project or solving a problem . . . Demands for creativity and innovation are driving American companies to create this new kind of organization. Technology is making this new organization possible. It is also changing the workplace in revolutionary ways. Working will never again be the same. It isn’t just a new workplace. It is a new world, where traditional notions of work and leisure and the employee

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Rita Caso; Jeanne Rierson; James Graham

, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (SMET) disciplinesi. There arecurrently 25 LSAMP projects in existence across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The Texas A&MSystem AMP was among the first six to be funded, beginning in Fall 1991. In addition to TexasA&M University (TAMU), the TX AMP has actively included 4 other Texas A&M SystemUniversities and 9 community colleges .Each campus has pursued the objectives of the AMP Program by implementing strategiesintended to increase retention, enrich learning, and encourage progression through SMET BSprograms into SMET graduate programs for under-represented minority students. While manyactivities for nurturing the academic success of under-represented minority SMET students wereemployed in several or

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Dan Budny

with the professors of the freshmen engineering classes tocollect assignments and grade projects and presentations. The topics covered during the firstsemester of freshmen seminar include, but are not limited to: Page 6.1008.5 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education Session: 27931. What is seminar? Why do I need to take seminar? Who is my mentor?2. Add/Drop, Medical Information, How to get involved in the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Val Girolamo; Seung Kim

knowledge and experience in problem solving.ConclusionThere are many laboratory projects that can compliment material engineering courses forengineering technology students. This paper presents an attempt to develop a laboratory exercisein the basis of a “practice-in-theory.” This laboratory exercise also provides a guide to approacha real world problem for solving. However, the relationship between weld line and tensilestrength loss (or retention) should be analyzed using a mold filling software: we will report moredetails in the conference.BIBLIOGRAPHY1. Malloy, R. Plastics Product Design for Injection Molding, Hanser/Gardner Publications, Cincinnati, 1994.2. Tushie, D, Jensen, G, & Beasley, N, Thermoplastic Injection Molding

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Rose Marra; Andrew Lau; John Wise; Robert Pangborn

networking and interaction with faculty, other engineering students, alumni and other industry practitioners; • in-class discussions or debate Page 6.900.2 • guest visits and presentations Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education • collaborative projects and other group activitiesFor a more complete description of the history and development of the Engineering First-YearSeminar program at Penn State, please see the companion paper in these proceedings, EngagingEngineering Students in Learning

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Barbara L. Christe

daily or almost every day will alleviate the frustration that can occur when a physicaldistance separates participants. Availability is key to successful course offerings for bothstudents and faculty.IV AssessmentCreativity is necessary when teaching a web-based course. Allow students to respond to thebulletin board postings of other students. Track minutes spent on class content pages for ameasure of course participation. Of course, traditional exams, taken on-line, are also a usefultool. A good distance educator will also mix in group projects, web-searches and otherassessment ideas that might be impossible in the traditional classroom. Think of the Internet asan additional resource for student evaluation.V Resources“Study Guide for Distance

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Harold Peddle; Daniel Wong

, temperaturesensors are installed for monitoring and control.III. Vendor Product SupportOn site assistance with 24 hour continuous, full-time telephone support is supplied by thevendor.This is required to minimize downtime and maximize usage and enables the students to contactsupport should questions arise.IV. ImplementationThe physical and financial constraints of the project limited the installation to twelveworkstations. Each station consists of a CPU with power supply, interface module for Page 6.922.2 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2001

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Vic Cundy; Don Rabern; David Gibson

specific assignment of equivalent credit hours to an activity is referred to as aloading factor. An example would be that a certain number of equivalent credit hours are used asa loading factor for chairing a major committee or being the advisor of a student professionalsociety.The sole cost factor that is input for each faculty member is academic year salary. Another basicinput is faculty FTE (full-time equivalent) that is charged to the instructional budget. For example,if an individual faculty member’s academic year salary is paid 75 percent from the instructionalbudget and 25 percent from an externally sponsored project, the faculty FTE would be entered as0.75 FTE. These two factors, salary and FTE, are important when the model calculates the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Jin Tso; Daniel Biezad

. Page 6.134.2 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright© 2001, American Society for Engineering EducationII.2 Learning objectives and expectationsThe M.S. program at VAFB has the same learning objectives and expectations as the maincampus. It is a two-year, 45 quarter-unit program, of which 29 units are for required coursesand 9 units for thesis or design project. The first year of the program is for students to takeadvanced courses in basic fields related to astronautical engineering. The thesis project istypically done in the second year. Since the students at VAFB are mostly working engineers andAir Force officers, they are encouraged to take two

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sandra Courter; Narayanan Murugesan; Jacob Eapen; Donna Lewis; Dan Sebald; Jodi Reeves

courses,Advanced Laboratory (undergraduate level) and Computer Aided Design for VLSI (graduatelevel). Nana knew that he would need to deal with several teaching issues in the undergraduatelevel lab course since it involved more responsibilities such as lecturing, proctoring, and gradingquizzes and projects. The graduate level course involved creating a course website, holdingdiscussion sections, and grading. The Advanced Laboratory course was new to Nana since hehad not done a similar course in his undergraduate studies. He chose to use peer mentoring,which was encouraged by the College and emphasized in the NEO training program. Nanaworked with Jacob (an experienced TA for that particular course) to get acquainted with therequirements and

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Ash Miller; Jeffrey Honchell

, and analysis forEngineering Technology students. One of the possible approaches is a strictly theoreticalapproach to antenna design. This approach would be based almost entirely of previousfindings and mathematical equations to calculate the various parameters needed fordesign. This approach would be educational and low-cost, but since the whole probleminvolves teaching antenna design, fabrication, and analysis to technology students, it doesnot require any hands-on aspects. Because of its downfalls, this project approach wasrejected.A second approach could involve an analysis of pre-fabricated antennas. Sinceengineering technology students would be working directly with the physical antennadesigns, this approach seemed to fit the criteria

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sanjay Joshi; SangHa Lee; Timothy Simpson; John Wise; Thomas Litzinger

learning. The workpresented in this paper focuses on assessment related to students’ ability to engage in self-directed learning and two pilot projects to enhance courses in ways that allow students todevelop their abilities to engage in self-directed learning.Selection of InstrumentIn his paper, “Undergraduate Foundations for Lifelong Learning,” Flammer 6 proposes a modelfor successful lifelong learning that has two aspects: motivation and ability. He divided each Page 6.211.2parameter into two areas. For motivation, these are “won’t do” and “will do,” and for ability, Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Dick Desautel

assessment) thatin turn supports the highest level (program assessment/enhancement). Content of the educationflows from course up to program level, and requirements for revision and improvement flowdown from program level to course level.The second basic feature is the integration of a longitudinal series of assessment data collections.The collection tools fall naturally into two categories that are distributed from (potentially)freshman through senior years and beyond into professional practice: • Traditional methods for faculty evaluation of student knowledge and skills within each course including the capstone course and senior project, e.g., course deliverables and grades. • Self-perception and external perception methods

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Susan Sharfstein; Patricia Relue

traditional lab reports. They wereinstructed to structure the memoranda to a supervisor and to keep them in the context of theoverall course objectives. A sample memo given to the students as a model is shown below. Thefinal report was a more formal document, detailing the entire project and its results to helpmaintain the overall context of the laboratory. In addition, the students prepared an oral reportsimilar to the type of presentation that would be given in an industrial setting. As part of ourABET accreditation process, we videotaped the student presentations. Page 6.240.5 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Sr., Edward Rogers; Hans Kunov

Session: Multi-Media Session 2793 Can auditory signal processing be used effectively in learning engineering concepts? H. Kunov, Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of TorontoIntroductionEngineering is usually taught using visual material and classical lectures, projects, andlaboratories. The main auditory component is verbal explanations by the teaching staff. Ibelieve the auditory system represents a rich, underused resource for learning engineeringconcepts. This became evident after I had introduced

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Raymond Laoulache; Nixon Pendergrass; Emily Fowler

-day basis, what research engineers do, how engineers deal with patentsand invention, women in engineering, and ethics in engineering. The students showed aprofound interest in these topics. During the first pilot semester, eight engineers wereinvited.During the semester there were impromptu engineering design projects. That is, studentswere not notified in advance about the nature of a design problem but were challenged tocome up with a design spontaneously in a limited time period. For example, in one earlyproject in a special extended class period, students were told to bring swimsuits but werenot told why. In class they were given a limited amount of materials and were asked todesign a cardboard canoe. They had two hours to design and

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

David Leonard

students • Text chat for "live meetings" in which students discuss electronic readings and projects • Team learning and collaborative learningThe program is divided into four modules, each of which is comprised of two courses: • Module 1. Advanced Technology • Multimedia • Hypermedia • Module 2. Business Issues/ Practices • Electronic Work Teams • Globalization of Electronic Communication • Module 3. Processes • Usability Evaluation of Web-based information • Online Information of Web based education and training modules • Module 4. Foundations • Learning Theories as applied to Knowledge Management • History and Theory of CommunicationIn addition, students participate in a

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Steven Levitt

in the workplace, it usually isn’tbecause people don’t have the right information. Things go awry when communication breaksdown – often because someone fails to see something from a different perspective”5.II. Brief Case ExamplesAn engineer was a partner in a small construction company working on the construction ofNASA headquarters in Houston, Texas. This was an enormous project with many contractorsand on a fast timeline. A backhoe operator working for the company was killed when he duginto a cable box that was not shown on any plans: the existence of the box was notcommunicated to the people doing the work. The cable box was not shown on any plans becauseit was connected to Top Secret facilities and therefore the cable box was also

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Jack Lesko; Eric Pappas

. We conduct our classes informally and teach these non-technical skills in a contextrelevant to students’ design projects. We try to create an atmosphere that lies realistically withinthe context of the professional workplace. The topics we have added to our curriculum movetowards a central point...to educate an individual who knows how to have a good career and agood life, and who is aware of the difference. Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education Page 6.985.4 Our departmental

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Daniel Waldorf

Engineering Educationexperiences. No evidence has been found, however, of the use of FEA in a manufacturingengineering curriculum.The goal for this project is to introduce the finite element method into the Tool Engineeringcourse for use in tool design. Specific objectives include: • Make students aware of FEA capabilities for analysis and encourage additional learning in the subject • Review the basic equilibrium equations for stress, strain, dynamics, etc., used in FEA • Give students a basic understanding of how the equations are integrated across a complex geometric shape • Introduce the concepts of meshing, element order and shape, shape functions, boundary conditions, number of elements, accuracy, and convergence of an

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Barbara Olds; Ronald Miller

approximately 250 eligible students (those incoming students whodid not have deficiencies or advanced placement credit for any of the first-year core courses). Tohelp improve mentoring in Connections, a second pilot group (1995-96 academic year) wascapped at 31 students in order to emphasize mentoring and forming a learning community.Through analysis of their grade point averages, retention rates, and satisfaction with the programand CSM, we determined shortly after the end of the Connections project that Connectionsstudents were persisting in higher numbers and were generally happier with their collegeexperience than their peers.Because it is now six years since the first Connections group entered CSM, we have undertakena follow-up study of the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Floersheim; Stephen Ressler; Margaret Bailey

director begins by creating a written draftdocument that includes a collection of narratives, assessment data, analysis of data, andproposed course revisions. Included in Figure 2 is a sample outline for a typical courseassessment plan as written in our department with attached sample data charts. Thecourse director’s role throughout the academic year is to teach the course as well asadminister all course related requirements. For example, a fluids course director mayteach three sections of a twenty-section course along with several other instructors.However, in addition to teaching, she also organizes the creation of common course wideexaminations, design projects, quizzes, etc.Course directors develop their written course assessment plan each

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Merredith Portsmore; Chris Rogers

-on activities whenever and wherever they want. The fundamental components ofthis set of materials are the LEGO RCX, a programmable LEGO brick, with the ability to store2000 points at up to 180 Hz and LabVIEW Student Edition. These materials, along with a set ofsensors, motors, and building components, are given to students at the beginning of the semester.The hardware, the RCX and LEGO elements, is small, portable, and relatively inexpensiveallowing students to use and program it in their dorm room using LabVIEW on their owncomputer. Projects have ranged from characterizing a spring to building and configuring ascanner. Labs addressed topics ranging from repeatability and uncertainty to Hooke’s law andFourier transforms. Eliminating the

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Rob Guardiola; Larry Hanneman; Steven Mickelson; Thomas Brumm

of appearing foolish; takes on challenging or unfamiliar assignments.Figure 2. Key Actions for the “Continuous Learning” competencyREPRESENTATIVE CAREER ACTIVITIES:• Participating in applied projects that require new knowledge.• Designing and/or performing experiments that require new knowledge.• Designing products that require engineers to learn new subject areas.• Questioning ethical professional responsibility when undertaking sensitive tasks.• Engaging in discussions on professional responsibility.• Taking courses outside of the “hard sciences” while in the workplace.• Using feedback from “customers” to learn new material that will improve a product.• Reading non-assigned books to learn new topics.• Attending conferences and seminars

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Carolyn Clark; Prudence Merton; Jim Richardson; Jeffrey Froyd

engineeringcurricula grow and improve. Therefore, the Foundation Coalition has undertaken aqualitative research project that examines processes through which coalition partnershave initiated and attempted to sustain curricular change. It is important to emphasizethat the focus of the study is the process of curricular change, not content of newcurricula. The project is organized as series of six qualitative case studies that examinecurricular change at each of the partner institutions. Data for each case study is collectedthrough interviews of approximately twenty key faculty and administrators as well asreview of relevant documentation. Each case study identifies critical events and salientissues involved in that process, as well as valuable lessons each

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

James Nelson; Bernd Schroder

this meant to sacrifice some highlycreative and beneficial activities for activities that were not as cutting edge, but which were morefeasible and still provided solid education. For example, commonly graded examinations7 are notpart of the integrated curriculum. Instead faculty strive to weave connections from parallel andearlier courses into their course. This includes, for example, homework assignments inmathematics that include problems from the text of the parallel engineering class, or projects thatrelate to content from other classes. The (achieved) goal of the design was to provide aframework for curricular integration with some integration in place and further opportunities forintegration available as the curriculum matures.A gradual

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Kamyar Haghighi; Heidi Diefes-Dux

requirements." Next,the seniors are asked to evaluate on a 5-point Likert scale the effectiveness of laboratoryexperiences and computer based projects in each ABE core course. Seniors are also asked toevaluate the frequency and effectiveness of exposure to a variety of communication methods(e.g. e-mail, technical writing, business writing, oral communication). Finally the seniors areasked to evaluate their competency in using a number of computer tools (e.g. operating systems,spreadsheets, engineering computation tools, data acquisition tools). A free response section isavailable to the seniors to suggest improvements to the laboratory, computer, and communicationcomponents of the program. This part concludes with a free response section that allows

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2001 Annual Conference

Authors

Manian Ramkumar; Immanuel Edinbarough

issuesVII. Conclusion & Future activitiesThe above project was undertaken to develop the infrastructure to attain the goal of establishinga fully operational non-site based lab course. The success of this effort has provided us withenough motivation to proceed further. This project has helped us build the followinginfrastructure:♦ Development of a remotely controlled manufacturing cell that can be utilized for web based hands-on CNC training♦ The integration of sensors and digital I/O interfaces with a computer based data acquisition & control system in developing an intelligent control architecture♦ Development of intelligent routines using visual basic, CGI-scripts and HTML for web based cell programming and control♦ A