Conference Session

Teams, Teaching, Leadership, and Technical Communications in Mechanical Engineering

Collection

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Timothy J. Jacobs, Texas A&M University; Rachal E. Thomassie, Texas A&M University

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Mechanical Engineering

such, departments must find creative and effective ways to providing properadvising and mentoring on these topics.One solution, which by itself provides such a high-impact learning experience, is a student-centered / student-led program to aid the department in providing services to students. Ourdepartment developed a student ambassador program to meet these needs. The main objective ofthe student ambassador program is to provide information about the department, major disciplineand university from a student’s perspective.This paper describes the student ambassador and program in more detail, provides preliminaryassessment of its effectiveness through analysis of the ambassador reflection pieces, and offersguidance on developing and

Conference Session

Teams, Capstone Courses, and Project Based-Learning

Collection

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

John S Gero, UNCC; Ting Song, South Puget Sound Community College

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Mechanical Engineering

engineering educators to develop teaching models andactivities to promote using problem decomposition and recomposition in engineering educationon the basis that professional engineers use more decomposition/recomposition that studentscurrently do.AcknowledgementsThis material is based partially upon work supported by Utah State University during Dr Song’sPhD candidature. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in thismaterial are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of that institution. Partof this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No.EEC- 1463873. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in thismaterial are those of the

Conference Session

Teams, Capstone Courses, and Project Based-Learning

Collection

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Molly A. McVey, University of Kansas; Carl W. Luchies, University of Kansas; Adrian Joseph Villicana, University of Kansas

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Mechanical Engineering

student.Each class began with the same two-stage reading quiz as was done in Fall 2014 semester(described above). The second activity, team development, required approximately five minutesand consisted of two questions for team discussion. The first question was an icebreaker,designed to be easy to answer and help the teams engage in conversation. The second questionwas designed to focus on team function and cause reflection on attributes of a team. A sample ofquestions used for each question type is provided in Table 1. After approximately four minutesof team discussion, the instructor asked a subset of the teams to quickly report to the class arepresentative answer to each question, and occasionally followed up with a brief discussion onthe

Conference Session

Undergraduate Research and a Force and Moment Lab

Collection

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Michelle Audrey Pang, Sandia National Laboratories; Carolyn Conner Seepersad, University of Texas, Austin; Sheldon Landsberger, University of Texas, Austin, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Mechanical Engineering

prior projects underthe same faculty in future years. The report also provides students with an opportunity to learnhow to write academic research papers and reflect on their semester’s work. Guidelines areprovided in Appendix C. Sample Projects and Outcomes. Over the tenure of the FIRE program, a number of projectshave been offered, ranging from analyzing human gait to develop a prototype for a prosthetichuman ankle to modeling and creating energy models of buildings for predicting energy efficiencymeasures to designing a fire suppression system. The project offerings selected for each cohorttake advantage of faculty expertise while maintaining a balance of theory based analysis (such asgenerating order of magnitude calculations or