Collection

2005 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Larry N. Bland

hours in theengineering buildings. They want to feel comfortable. Is the general atmosphere inviting? Arethere comfortable study areas? Are computers and equipment available 24/7? Is the technologyup-to-date? Are faculty offices accessible? There is a delicate balance required in this area. Students and parents expect advanced,state-of-the-art engineering facilities, the facility cannot look like a clinical laboratory. It musthave a certain level of personal comfort and appeal. Pictures and decorations need a blend oftechnical content and appealing décor. Laboratory and classroom space must create a goodimage. A laboratory with no visible equipment may be neat and protected, but can leave animpression that the school is under funded and

Collection

2005 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

K. Madhavan

at CBUChristian Brothers University is a small Catholic university. The School of Engineeringoffers degrees in electrical, mechanical, chemical and civil and environmentalengineering. The CEE program requires studies in structural, soil, traffic andtransportation, hydraulics and water resources in addition to other courses in physics,chemistry, mathematics and the liberal arts. Only the courses in the geotechnicalsequence are described here. Three required courses are offered in geotechnicalengineering (geotechnical engineering, geotechnical engineering laboratory and design offoundations) along with elective courses. In the first two courses, students learn thefundamentals and in the third course, they are required to design various types

Collection

2005 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Chris Ramseyer; Beth Brueggen

necessity,was beneficial as an undergraduate research experience and has became a key tool for recruitingstudents to our graduate program. It also proved to be an effective method for increasing theamount of high-quality research completed in our laboratory.Background:The structural engineering group at OU lost all five faculty members between mid 1999 and late2000. As new faculty members were hired, there was a period of time during which very littleresearch was conducted at Fears Structural Engineering Laboratory. Between 2001 and 2003,only two students completed thesis-based Masters of Science degrees with a structuralengineering focus. While the undergraduate program in structural engineering had beenrelatively unaffected, the graduate program

Conference Session

Problem-Solving & Project-Based Learning

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Kathleen Harper; John Demel; Richard Freuler

rank the situations according to a particular parameter, explaining their reasoning. (typically Bloom’s 3 to 5 although one could envision complex situations requiring students to operate at level 6) 6. WRONG Problems: In these, students are presented with a problem statement and a possible solution for which they must identify and correct errors. (Bloom’s 6) 7. Design & Build: In these types of laboratory experiences, students are asked to design an apparatus to perform a function. There are typically multiple ways to solve the problem. (Bloom’s 5 to 6) Page

Conference Session

Crossing the Discipline Divide!

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Dana Warren; Abolghasem Shahbazi; Jianzhong Lou; Keith Schimmel

(such as Tone polymer by former Union Carbide)2, and polylactic acid(pioneered by Argonne National Laboratories). Although there are issues related to both cost andmonomer supplies, development of lactic acid based biodegradable polymers appears to be mostactive, and a number of commercial projects are under way.While there has been a lot of research on biodegradable polymers and increasingcommercialization of biodegradable polymers, the availability of educational materials on thisimportant subject are disproportionate to other areas of polymer education.3 There is anincreasing demand for skills in this area from companies involved in the research and productdevelopment activities of this class of polymers.4-6 Therefore, a biodegradable

Conference Session

Emerging Trends in Engineering Education Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Eugene Perry Deess; Judy Valyo; Kamal Joshi; Vladimir Briller; Raymond Calluori; John Carpinelli

concept of open-ended design has remained at the core. Studies have shown that the freshman engineering designcourses have resulted in increased retention and 6-year graduation rates [1], thus meeting aprimary objective of the courses. Materials developed for these courses from several disciplines Page 10.515.1 Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Educationare available at the web sites for the Gateway Engineering Education Coalition [2] and NJIT’sGateway Coalition web site [3], including the laboratory

Conference Session

Student Learning and Research

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Ronald Rockland

, anticipate potential problems, anddevelop procedures. Students were required to write these steps as part of the pre-lab portion oftheir laboratory report.At first, there was resistance by a number of students, who felt that all they wanted to do was“complete the lab”. Eventually, those students who offered some resistance found that, contraryto initial beliefs, the laboratory assignments actually took less time to complete, if the procedureswere followed. Some students told the instructor that they applied this problem solving approachto other laboratory based courses.Toolbox concept Page 10.1067.2The next approach in helping to develop

Conference Session

Writing and Communication I

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Bill Chapman; John Brocato; Jim Harden

Improving the Writing-Evaluation Abilities of Graduate Teaching Assistants in ECE Labs John Brocato, Jim Harden, Bill Chapman Mississippi State UniversityIntroductionIn 1999, faculty in the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State Universitybegan a project to improve the writing-evaluation skills of graduate teaching assistants(TAs) in charge of undergraduate laboratories in electrical and computer engineering(ECE). Long considered valuable for discipline-specific undergraduate writingexperiences, undergraduate laboratories have also proven problematic due to the largegaps between sound writing-instruction pedagogy, the standards and

Conference Session

Improving Mechanics of Materials

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Ali Mohammadzadeh

in the laboratory to do the measurements. For ourtrial beam (see Figure 1), L = 11.5 in., b = 1 in, t = 1/8 in, α = 10o, E = 10.4×106psi, and υ = 0.33.The strains measured were ε1 = 973µ, ε2 = 686 µ, and ε3 = 449 µ. Appendix A is a MathCAD fileof the calculations for approaches I and II. As it is seen in appendix A von Mises stresses forapproaches I and II are calculated as: σvon Mises, approach I = 12470 psi σvon Mises, approach II = 11930 psiAppendix B indicates that the Algor file renders

Conference Session

A Renaissance in NRE Programs

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Sukesh Aghara; Irvin Osborn-Lee

recent hiring of a new faculty member with anuclear engineering background dedicated specifically to the development of the programit is expected to boost student enrollment in courses offered at PVAMU campus and theTTVN classes. Also a national recognition by numerous DOE laboratories of the need toincrease minority enrollments at such institutions is expected to influence students at theuniversities to consider nuclear engineering as a prospective career option. The uniqueness of the PVAMU program comes from the way it is setup. It isbased in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the NASA Center for AppliedRadiation Research (CARR) is an integral part of the program. The course curriculum isdesired to include specific topics

Conference Session

Distance & Service Learning, K-12, Web & Work-Based Projects

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Leijun Li; John Pan; Ismail Fidan

or overhead projector.The instructor then hopes that students can regurgitate this collected information on theirhomework or examinations. Some classes have accompanied laboratory practices where students Page 10.1280.1can gain hands-on experience. However, the lecture-based teaching may not meet all students’ “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”needs. For example, some students (i.e. disabled, shy) sit quietly in a lecture room through thewhole semester/quarter. They may not

Conference Session

Design and Computation in ChE Courses

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael Elly; Mordechai Shacham; Michael Cutlip

equation within Excel can beaccomplished by the use of either Goal Seek or Solver from the Tools menu. For this problem,the Solver will be used to minimize the nonlinear equation in cell C20 by adjusting the AFT incell C19. This is shown in Figure 8. Note that the Excel solution yields an AFT of 2017.9949 ascompared to the Polymath solution which yielded an AFT of 2017.995 which is excellentagreement between the two numerical solutions. Note that Solver in Excel is useful forsimultaneous nonlinear equations, while Goal Seek would be useful for only a single nonlinearequation.3. Enthalpy Calculations Using Excel PropertiesIf the problem to be used in the stoichiometry or numerical methods course, or in the ChemicalEngineering laboratory (to compare

Conference Session

Innovative Curriculum in ET

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Ganapathy Narayanan

Society for Engineering Educationplots of the system responses. The MATLAB software and its control commands tool-box rescue the instructor and students in this course with many advantages for both,especially for the ET student. Of course, some special virtual laboratory time needs to bespent by students to get trained in the use of these select MATLAB control commands.Thus, the ET student is trained in solving the control analysis/design problem withoutgetting distracted with many intermediate calculations, and subsequently, the student’scomprehension of the controls subject is much better. The student can then concentrateefforts in the overall design/analysis of a control system, leaving computationalcrunching to the virtual computer program

Conference Session

Writing and Communication I

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

David Adams; William Manion

curricula. Civil Engineering Materials Laboratory (CIE 111) was the first course to incorporate the new plan. CIE 111 is a 1-credit laboratory component of a basic course in civil engineering materials, incorporating topics in material variability, plastics, metals, wood and concrete. Historically, students produced five full academic lab reports during the semester, with less than satisfactory results for the most part. Recent enrollment growth (to around 100 students) introduced further complication. The new ECP approach replaced the academic lab reports with five case-based memo assignments, which allowed for more specific instructional goals, more meaningful feedback to students and a

Conference Session

Emerging Trends in Engineering Education Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Carlotta Berry

evaluate student performance based upon gender, major,class, requisite performance, and the number of times an introductory circuits course was taken.This circuits course is required by all engineering majors including civil, architectural,mechanical and electrical engineers and it is the gateway to all upper level courses. This datawill be used to determine general trends in student performance in order to redesign the courseand laboratory to be more successful. Success in this context is defined as a reduced attritionrate as well as increased student performance as determined by final grades. This document willpresent the results of the statistical analysis of the student data and the presence of anysignificant negative or positive

Conference Session

Course and Curriculum Innovations in ECE

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

John Board; April Brown; Joseph Holmes; Hisham Massoud; Steven Cummer; Jungsang Kim; Michael Gustafson; Leslie Collins; Lisa Huettel; Gary Ybarra

(ISIP), whichreflects key concepts governing the future of electrical and computer engineering as wellas the active research areas of the majority of the ECE faculty.While the redesign encompasses the entire four-year curriculum, a particular emphasis ofthe redesign will be on the students' early years in the core curriculum when retentionissues are the most critical. Specifically, the foundation of the new curriculum will be afreshman-year laboratory-based design experience called “Fundamentals of ECE,” anddenoted ECE 27. This innovative course introduces concepts fundamental to the entireECE curriculum and their practical applications through a tight coupling of courseworkand a real-world design project and laboratory experience. Our project

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

William White; George Engel; Cen Karacal; Ai-ping Hu; Jerry Weinberg

fieldsof engineering which are integral to robotic systems: Computer Science (CS), Electrical andComputer Engineering (ECE), Mechanical Engineering (ME), and Industrial and ManufacturingEngineering (IME). This is a two-year project supported by a grant from the National ScienceFoundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education under the Course, Curriculum, and Lab Ini-tiative – Adaptation & Implementation Program. The course adapts curriculum material fromCMU’s General Robotics Course2,14, from Swarthmore University’s and Bryn Mawr College’sRobot Building Laboratory Project (NSF CCLI Grant #9651472)10, from Drexel University’sResearch and Education Tools for Low-Cost Robots (NSF CISE Grant #9986105)6,7, from Buck-nell University’s Catalyst Team

Conference Session

IP, Incubation, and Business Plans

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Matthews; Morteza Sadat-Hossieny; Mark Rajai

conclusion.MissionThe virtual center promotes the opportunity to gain the knowledge and innovation skills to copewith the formidable technological, economic, social, and financial changes associated withcreating value from technological knowledge in an age of global competition. The focus of thecenter is on the rapid transfer of research, knowledge, and technology from the laboratory tothe marketplace.CPIC is ideal for professionals who: • Work in multi-functional, and perhaps global and virtual, product development teams. • Work in supply chain management or supplier partnering. • Are interested in general management of technology commercialization processes. • Work in technology transfer at a university, R&D laboratory, incubator

Conference Session

Innovative Topics in ChE Curriculum

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Timothy Ward; Robert Busch; Abhaya Datye; David Kauffman

our contention that a core of about twelve semesterhours of chemical engineering courses, together with appropriate chemistry, physics andmathematics, can provide the minimum basic material. There could then be ample room forstudents to complete their undergraduate education, including laboratory and design work, in achemical engineering specialty area program which would incorporate applications of the basiccore material and fundamental material for the specialty. This paper offers one version of aminimum core along with illustrations of how specialty areas would build on it.IntroductionThe field of chemical engineering is expanding. Chemical engineers are currently working insuch fields as biological processing, biochemical engineering

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Robi Polikar; Maria Tahamont; Ravi Ramachandran; Linda Head

background about the topic oftenhesitate in electing a course in which they may very well find interest. Furthermore, as the num-ber of credits required for obtaining a BS degree decline over the years due to market pressures,so do the number of electives offered. Against this background, we propose another time-honored technique, under a new setting,as a paradigm specifically designed for integrating novel content material into existing curricu-lum: develop new laboratory exercises tailored to provide content specific knowledge that relateto the focus areas of existing courses. In our implementation, we use biomedical engineering(BME) as the novel content and the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) as the core cur-riculum, with two primary

Collection

2005 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Stephan A. Durham; W. Micah Hale

shelter. Students on severaloccasions have stated that upon leaving the class, they not only learned the class material, buthad fun doing it.IntroductionStructural Materials, CVEG 2113, is a required civil engineering class at the University ofArkansas. The class is typically taken by second semester sophomores or first semester juniors.The course introduces students to construction materials used in everyday civil engineeringapplications. Approximately two-thirds of the class discussions involve concrete materials withthe remaining lectures concerning steel, wood, and fiber reinforced polymers. The classschedule consists of two fifty-minute lectures and one three hour laboratory each week of thesemester. The laboratory is designed to emphasize

Collection

2005 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Ken French

Vertical Integration with a Vortex Tube Ken French John Brown UniversityAbstract Vortex tubes are made by small groups of students in a freshman engineering‘concepts and design’ class. The tubes are made from specially prepared kits with detailsimportant to performance left un-finished. Students in an elective manufacturingmethods class produce the kit components once they are designed. An upper division fluid mechanics class will use laboratory sessions to measureand compare the performance of the freshman teams’ vortex tubes. Design, CAD andteam dynamic are essential components of the learning10.Background The vortex

Conference Session

Architectural Engineering Education I

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Daniel Davis

emotional element. A handful of profound learningexperiences requiring analysis and synthesis are vastly more lasting and important to studentsthan weeks spent skimming reams of superficial facts for memorization and recall.Translating these attributes of powerful, effective learning experiences into architectural termsrequires creativity and even a bit of humility on the part of the designer. But in early 2002, I hadan experience that led me to do some serious thinking about spaces designed for hands-on,exploratory learning. I happened to visit the new Aerospace Research Laboratory at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. What especially impressed me about thefacility were the studios where engineering students gather to build

Conference Session

Emerging Trends in Engineering Education Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Daniel Davis

emotional element. A handful of profound learningexperiences requiring analysis and synthesis are vastly more lasting and important to studentsthan weeks spent skimming reams of superficial facts for memorization and recall.Translating these attributes of powerful, effective learning experiences into architectural termsrequires creativity and even a bit of humility on the part of the designer. But in early 2002, I hadan experience that led me to do some serious thinking about spaces designed for hands-on,exploratory learning. I happened to visit the new Aerospace Research Laboratory at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. What especially impressed me about thefacility were the studios where engineering students gather to build

Conference Session

Curriculum Development in Electrical ET

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Gene Harding

oscilloscopes and logic analyzers) 5 Probability and statistics (probability distribution functions), Gaussian distribution, mean, standard deviation Clock recovery, unit interval Logic analyzer laboratory (if available) 6 Jitter measurements (period, cycle-cycle, n-cycle, TIE) Jitter measurement displays (histogram, trend, spectrum, eye diagram, bathtub curve) Real time DSO jitter software (Agilent, Amherst, LeCroy, Tektronix) Distinguishing and quantifying different types of DJ Introduce BERTs and sampling oscilloscopes Jitter analysis laboratory 7

Conference Session

MIND Education Trends

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Omnia El-Hakim

fostering socialresponsibility, community service and scholarly research that contribute to the social, economicand cultural well being of the Navajo Nation. CO-AMP has moved quickly to achieve program effectiveness within the participatinginstitutions and among its tribal partners, and has entered into several collaborative efforts withexisting federally- and state-funded programs, professional non-profit organizations,corporations, and government agencies/laboratories. Also, CO-AMP has aimed for thecontinued institutionalization of its programs through in-depth communication and collaborationwith CO-AMP partner institutions and with Colorado Institute of Technology (CIT) activitiesinitiated by Colorado Governor Bill Owens. CO-AMP’s

Conference Session

Advancing Manufacturing Through Outreach

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Frank Liou

in the hope ofimpacting the career choices of their students. Some high school students alsoparticipated in the workshop. The material presented in the workshop included CADmodeling, rapid prototyping, and lean manufacturing. Some industrial representativescame to the workshop to interact with the teachers and students on the prospectives ofadvanced manufacturing technologies. The participants also toured manufacturingresearch laboratories on campus and two local manufacturing facilities. This paperdetails the experiences of both the participants and facilitators of the workshop.I. IntroductionIt is a common misconception that jobs in the manufacturing industry consist of onlymachine operators. However, industry’s needs are much broader

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Kevin Dahm

textbooks [1,2] on relatingtheory to industrially relevant chemical reactions. There is an ongoing effort at RowanUniversity to integrate these new tools and ideas into the chemical reaction engineeringcourse. This paper describes reaction experiments that have been developed, and howthey are intended to complement other activities in the course.The Rowan chemical reaction engineering class has a weekly 3-hour laboratory period,which, until recently, has been devoted to virtual experiments conducted usingPOLYMATH, HYSYS and ASPEN. These computer laboratories are valuable becausethey illustrate many of the same concepts as wet-lab experiments with less substantialtime, cost and space requirements. Students can use a simulation to explore

Conference Session

Multidisciplinary Design

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

John Nastasi; Leslie Brunell; Keith Sheppard

, American Society for Engineering EducationThe Product-Architecture Digital Media Laboratory supports the Masters program. Thelaboratory focuses on advanced digital design environments including geometricmodeling, interactivity, scripting languages and virtual reality. The laboratory is equipedwith a full Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) suite.Interactive Digital Media is explored using scripting capabilities in Maya, ActionScripting and Rhino and the laboratory includes a full set of ceiling mounted cameras,blob tracking devices and projection systems for full scale performative environmentstudies. Three dimensional scanning technologies are explored using a wide array ofdevices including a Cyrax - Lidar type

Conference Session

ABET Issues and Capstone Design

Collection

2005 Annual Conference

Authors

Kendrick Aung

group of students to discuss the project, to keep trackof the progress, and to learn the problems. During the semester, each design group makes twoprogress presentations followed by the question and answer session. At the end of the semester,the students complete the final report and make the final presentation of their design.Descriptions of the Projects The author has guided 8 design projects during the last three years at Lamar University.Only two projects from these classes were discussed in this paper. The first project involved thedesign of a laboratory-scale test stand for demonstrating air-conditioning processes using theSenior Design Grant from American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioningEngineers (ASHRAE