video technology has become a widely used medium for education. A prominentimplementation of this technology, interactive distance learning, involves groups of students atlocal and remote sites connected by audio and video teleconferencing. This approach has madethe task of delivering vital undergraduate and graduate engineering courses to distributedaudiences much easier.As this approach has permeated more curricula, distance education instructors have increasinglyassigned projects that require distance learners to work together as an element of the final coursegrade. This trend presents an interesting opportunity for researchers to understand the nature ofinteractions among course participants involved in project teams.This paper presents the
community consists of aseries of linked classes where cohorts of students are registered together, co-curricular activities.Some learning communities also offered a residential component where students are assigned tothe same floor of a residence hall. Service-learning has been integrated as a curricular tie for allthree of the First-Year Engineering Learning Communities.Students elect to participate in a learning community. Information about the learningcommunities is distributed in the spring and students register for them as part of the class andhousing registration process. The expectation of a service-learning project was made clear toeach participant. The honors learning community is only open to students in the Engineering
Without BordersPresent in a growing number of campuses nationally (90% growth rate in 2005 hasresulted in 100 university chapters at present), Engineers Without Borders is a non-profitgroup which focuses on international engineering service projects, mainly in developingnations. Operationally, the key advantage of a student chapter is being able to leveragethe information network provided from the reputation of the organization. Understandingthe nuances of finding, funding, building and maintaining projects in developing countiesis possible through interactions with existing chapters, attending EWB nationalconferences, and using EWB website resources. These are not minor challenges.Programmatic advantages of having an EWB chapter serve as one key
summarized as follows: ‚ Provide marketable skills ‚ Provide a significant design experience ‚ Require an appropriate amount of effortIndustry: Industry can be a customer of a capstone course in multiple ways. First, manycapstone projects are sponsored by industry. The capstone course must provide students with thetools and guidance necessary to provide a quality product to their industrial customers. Second,since many students seek employment after graduation, industry becomes an important customeras they hire new graduates. A capstone course should assist in providing students with the skillsthat are valuable to industry. Providing students with marketable skills, therefore, serves theneeds of both students and industry. Customer needs
build an electrodynamic loudspeaker from simple components thatcan produce clear and loud sound. Other classroom-tested mechanical dissection andsimple construction projects will be explained and demonstrated. Workshop participantswill learn strategies and techniques for successful implementation of hands-on howthings work activities.Cost $40Limited to 20 participants Page 11.676.2
, scienceor engineering major. Those cadets take a three-course engineering sequence in thedepartment, the goal of which is to “enhance[e] their quantitative problem-solving skillsand … provid[e] introductory engineering design experiences.”1 The sequenceculminates with a capstone course in which the cadets work with a real client to solve aproblem for him or her. That course is SE450, Project Management and System Design.This paper focuses strictly on that course, which has been successful in achieving bothdepartment and Academy goals by aligning the course assignments to a decision makingprocess and incorporating a real-world client into the course.This paper will begin by comparing the findings of some of the relevant literatureregarding capstone
Maryland-College Park PAIGE E. SMITH, Ph.D., Director of the Women in Engineering Program, A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland. Dr. Smith is a co-PI of the CCLI grant. She provides leadership in recruiting and retaining female engineering students for the college. Her current research focuses on engineering design teams and project management. Page 11.269.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 20061526: BESTEAMS: A Curriculum for Engineering Student Team Training by Engineering FacultyEngineering instructors who have uttered the following sentence have
this objective. These examples illustratehow several readily available computer programs along with traditional hand computationalmethods may be used to enhance and enliven the subject of mechanisms analysis.Traditional computational methods augmented with computer programs familiar to allengineering technology students, are used to compute kinematics and kinetics quantities. Strongemphasis is placed on the verification and accuracy checking potential of this computerintegrated approach.IntroductionA typical course in mechanisms analysis frequently requires the use of traditional computationalprocedures that may place unnecessary limits on assigned projects. This paper suggests onepossible alternative to the “snap-shot” approach to the
auditory system. Page 11.567.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Engineering for Everyone: Charging Students with the Task of Designing Creative Solutions to the Problem of Technology LiteracyIntroductionThe first year Introduction to Engineering course at Smith College, “EGR100: Engineering forEveryone,” is designed to be accessible to all students, regardless of background, yet it alsoserves as the foundation for students who choose to major in Engineering Science. In this course,students are introduced to the engineering design process via “mini-projects” that
linear or sequential processfollowing basic research as portrayed in 1945. Rather, creative engineering projects in industryfrequently drive the need for directed strategic research efforts at universities when necessary oranticipated in order to gain a better understanding of the natural phenomena involved.New technology is brought about by a very purposeful and systematic practice of engineeringinvolving the deliberate recognition of meaningful human needs and the deliberate engineeringcreation of new ideas and concepts to effectively meet these needs though responsible leadership.Engineering practice and its resulting outcome technology have been redefined for the 21stcentury.1 Engineering must no longer be misconstrued as “applied science
JOHN J. DUFFY is a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department, the Coordinator for the Solar Engineering Graduate Program, and the Director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has written over 70 papers on solar engineering, environmental analysis, and education. He has integrated service-learning into nine engineering courses at the undergraduate and graduate level with local and international projects and is the principal investigator on an NSF grant to integrate service-learning into the entire curriculum of the college of engineering at UML. He also coordinates the Village Empowerment project which has designed and installed over
servicelearning. The management of teams class syllabus had planned a semester’s study of teamtheory, observation of team influence and roles and analysis of team performance in films. Theclass made a decision to radically restructure the learning experience to respond to their needs toactively work for a positive outcome from a tragic event.This article talks about how the changed class format helped students to integrate skills from abroad college experience—marketing, accounting, writing, management, leadership, graphics,public relations, facilities planning, project management and research. The learning cyclechanged from observation and reflection, abstract concepts, testing in new situations andexperiencing (Kolb & Fry)1 to one of creating
feetabove normal. The impact on the twin spans was devastating, causing damage to nearly40% of the pre-cast decks on both east-bound and west-bound spans, rendering the bridgeimpassable. Re-establishing this link to the city was critical to commerce in the city ofNew Orleans. Boh Brothers Construction Co., locally founded contractor with its mainoffice in the Central Business District of New Orleans, won the job for repairing thebridge. Boh’s bid included a fast-tracked 45-day schedule for completion of Phase-I ofthe project, which included repairing the east-bound span and opening it to two-waytraffic. A combination of innovation, intimate knowledge of local conditions, andefficiency resulted in the completion of the project ahead of schedule
student design competencies in the topical area of communication.Topics covered include Internet navigation, website design, word processing, presentationsoftware, and computer aided design and drafting using AutoCAD.The second component of the course deals with manual graphic and drafting skills. Students areintroduced to the fundamentals of orthographic projection. The topics covered include multiviewprojection, dimensioning, lettering, oblique and isometric projection, sectional views, tolerances,scales, and selected topics in descriptive geometry.The third component of ED&G 100 focuses on team-based engineering design projects. Workingtogether in teams, students work on design projects selected from various disciplines ofengineering. This
engineering faculty/student partnership involved exposing theundergraduate to a small scale research project designed to reflect typical activities experiencedby graduate students. The student went through the entire cycle of design, simulation,fabrication, and test of a working device prototype. Through this approach, the studentexperienced a microcosm of graduate school while interacting with graduate students,experiencing the difference between laboratory and simulation work, and developing technicalwriting skills through the development of the electronic portfolio.IntroductionA program referred to as "Research on Research" has been developed to expose undergraduatestudents to academic research. The program is instituted through the Technology
teamwork and communication, and is not effectively taughtby lecture, cookbook labs, or emphasizing analytical solution techniques. To communicateconcepts and skills requires students to both develop an understanding of concepts and to testthat understanding by applying the concepts and skills. Application serves as formative Page 11.1424.2 1 This work is funded by the National Science Foundation under grants: 0230695 & 0311257.evaluation. VECTOR is a project-based approach to EM in which student teams develop andevaluate their grasp of concepts through application in a complete project design-build-test cycle.The introductory EM
. Page 11.1427.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Vertical Mentoring: Closing the Loop in DesignAbstractTo help students ‘close the loop in design’ – that is, appreciate the importance and depth of theirdesign knowledge through a specific demonstration of this ability beyond their capstone designproject – we have implemented a vertical mentoring scheme in biomedical engineering design.Biomedical engineering seniors in the fourth quarter of the design sequence serve as designmentors to teams of juniors beginning their first quarter of design.In the junior-level course, student teams work on a smaller, common design project to ‘practice’a complete iteration of the design process before they tackle larger, more
instructionalmaterials for use in engineering classrooms to adapt the instructional materials for use inbusiness classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to report on the instructional materials thatintegrated methods to teach fundamental statistics skills with the introduction to businessapplications. We also tested these instructional materials in classrooms during summer 2005 andthe results of the test are reported. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop innovative andwell-tested instructional materials that help teach statistics to students in the colleges of businessand engineering.Literature Review Contemporary business practice has undergone a drastic change in this informationage where the business processes, accounting systems, and
multidisciplinary projects. Page 11.1086.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Research in the Undergraduate EnvironmentAbstractThe benefits of research experiences for undergraduates are significant. For many faculty, thesewere the experiences that convinced us to pursue further education and a career in academia.However, performing research at an undergraduate institution carries with it certain challenges.In traditional research institutions, doctoral students perform most of the research activities, ledby the faculty. These students have completed at least their undergraduate courses and can beexpected to remain
Society for Engineering Education, 2006 “Assessing the Comprehensive Design Studio Course through Alternate Methods”AbstractCourse assessment typically consists of the review of a course by the teaching faculty memberbased on student grades from the course. This process, without additional methods, can lead to afalse sense of success in a course, and it becomes necessary to find alternate methods for furtherassessment.For the comprehensive design studio course, alternate methods of assessment have beenemployed. This course is a semester long architectural and engineering design studio where allphases of an architectural design project are covered, from schematic design through designdocumentation. In
cutting-edgeNASA-related research into the undergraduate curriculum. Cal Poly Pomona chose toincorporate the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) robotic technology research into theundergraduate curricula of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, theEngineering Technology Department, Mechanical Engineering Department, and the ComputerScience Department. We proposed to conduct an interdisciplinary project, "Deep SpaceExploration using Smart Robotic Rovers", and develop an autonomous robotic rover.During the last three years, students and faculty participating in this program have developed arobotic rover that has successfully accomplished the initial goals of the project: (1) semi-autonomous navigation systems for remote robots, (2
other partneringinstitutions to enhance the program are discussed. Also included in this paper are themajor curriculum development and outreach activities, including an interdisciplinarycapstone design project to provide opportunities for students to design, manufacture, andactually market a product, which can stimulate students’ interest in real-world productrealization, the summer manufacturing workshop for high-school teachers and students,and research programs to develop laboratory facilities and support graduate programs.IntroductionTo live well, a nation must produce well. U.S. manufacturing is a critical area that cannotafford to be lost, but it is facing a great challenge. When the industry’s manufacturingjobs are out-sourced
through an emphasis on their application in developingcommunities worldwide. The course emphasizes sustainable approaches for improving publichealth and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between practitioners of publichealth, the environmental sciences, and engineering. The course was piloted for the first time inSpring 2005 to eight graduate students. Semester-long team projects were associated withexisting Engineers Without Borders (EWB) - CU projects in Peru, Mali, and Rwanda. Thestudents identified the major health problems in the community, indicated engineering solutionsthat would improve these, and prioritized the health problems and solutions with regards to costsand benefits. Feedback from the students and instructors was
Automotive Lighting SystemsThis paper is a summary and demonstration of an innovative senior design project. Theprimary impetus for this project was to reduce the Cu content in recycled steel fromautomobiles. Although recycling steel from automobiles is a large business and growingglobally, there is little incentive to separate out the copper wiring before recycling theautomotive chassis. The slow but inevitable increase in copper content with eachgeneration of recycled steel can lead to too much variability in the mechanical andwelding properties of the steel.The project team decided to focus on redesigning the electrical power distribution systemto allow for easy retrieval of the copper. Three senior students at Loyola College inMaryland worked as
2006-1626: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MECHANICAL ENGINEERINGFRESHMAN PROGRAMTimothy Hinds, Michigan State University Timothy Hinds is an Academic Specialist in the Michigan State University Department of Mechanical Engineering. He teaches undergraduate courses in machine design, manufacturing processes, mechanics and computational tools. He also teaches a senior-level undergraduate international design project course and has taught graduate-level courses in engineering innovation and technology management. He received his BSME and MSME degrees from Michigan Technological University.Craig Somerton, Michigan State University Craig Somerton is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the
-based teaching and learning. Clearly, implementing new processes ofassessment of outcomes for ABET is having a significant effect on our programs. We have beenfortunate to have other influences, as well, including good counsel from external advisory boardsand the resources from an endowed center for engineering education, both of which have beeneffective in fostering change.Over the last 15 years, these diverse drivers for change have nurtured nearly 50 major projectsfor which substantial funding was available. These 50 initiatives, however, do not begin torepresent the totality of the effort because many individual faculty and small groups of facultycarried out projects to improve what they are doing in their own classes without the benefit
hydrogen fuel cells as a step towards creating a clean and sustainable future. The schoolhas now compiled an impressive collection of fuel cell technology for hands-on student use andhas established a course devoted to fuel cells. With the creation of Protium, the Initiative’s fuelcell-powered band, hydrogen fuel cell education is also an extracurricular activity successfullyspreading the word far beyond the school community, with fuel cell demonstration performanceshaving taken place in Miami, San Antonio, Palm Springs, and Hollywood. Fuel cell education is approached with a hands-on, minds-on philosophy with much ofthe learning project-based. Last year’s capstone project was the creation of Rhode Island’s firstfuel cell vehicle, a two
2006-1279: INNOVATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF A MULTIDISCIPLINARYENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE: INCREASING INTERDISCIPLINARYINTERACTIONSteven Northrup, Western New England College Page 11.766.1© American Society for Engineering Education, 2006 Innovation and Improvement of a Multidisciplinary Engineering Design Course: Increasing Interdisciplinary InteractionAbstractInnovations to a multidisciplinary team design experience have been made with the objective ofincreasing the level of interdisciplinary design required for successful project completion. Theproject required teams of four to five students to design, machine
energy measurements and equipment efficiency. The Annual Energy Outlook 2004 (AEO2004) with projections to 2025 [2,3] presents acritical review of energy use of USA in the residential, commercial, industrial, transportationsectors for the period 1970 - 2025. The graphs from AEO2004 forecast an increase in energyconsumption in most sectors, and that primary energy use will exceed 136 quadrillion Btu peryear by 2025, 40 percent higher than the 2002 level. However, the forecast indicates that theincrease can stabilize as more efficient energy generation and consumption technologies offsetthe demand for more energy. Arkansas’s per capita energy use is similar to other states, with itsenergy use and savings dependent on the population and
paper describes theplanning process and it addresses the following elements. First, the curriculum will be modifiedto include effective, research-based pedagogies for teaching electrical engineering, particularlyextensive experiential learning. EWU’s curricular revisions will include adding a laboratorycomponent to each class in the EE major, developing a class for each year of study that includesa service learning component, developing a class for each year of study that requires work on areal industry project, and requiring an internship and a project-based senior project for eachstudent. Second, the program will be offered in a dual-site mode in both the EWU’s Cheneycampus and at North Seattle Community College (NSCC), a community college