Conference Session

FPD1 -- Implementing a First-Year Engineering Course

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Jenny Lo, Virginia Tech; Vinod Lohani, Virginia Tech; Odis Griffin, Virginia Tech

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

, andprogramming courses to a format that emphasizes early design and realization, collaborativelearning, and highly interactive classroom environments3,4,5,6. Beginning in fall 2002, College ofEngineering (COE) required all engineering freshmen to own laptop computers, which wereimmediately incorporated into the classroom environment. After considerable discussion in2004, an improved ENGE1024 syllabus was designed to include general problem solving,engineering ethics, visualization of 3-D objects and also visualization of information, earlydesign (including realization), graphing and simple analysis of graphs, and introduction toobject-oriented programming (OOP) approaches for problem solving. This new course wasoffered for the first time in fall 2004.7

Conference Session

FPD8 -- Systems, Nanotechnology & Programming

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Helen Burn, University of Michigan; James Holloway, University of Michigan

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

broken into lab/discussion sections of 25 students each. A faculty memberoversees each lecture section and supervises 3 graduate student instructors who each lead 3lab/discussion sections. There are generally 3 lecture sections each term, but these are often runlargely independently of each other, other than a shared set of course objectives. The curriculum(syllabus, assignments, exams) is homogeneous within each lecture section and its coupled labsections. While there is variation from lecture section to lecture section, course assignmentsgenerally include 8 to 12 projects whose solution requires the implementation of an algorithm ineither C++ or MATLAB, along with 6 to 8 hours of exams.Faculty in the college of engineering worked carefully on