Conference Session

Innovative Techniques for Freshmen (0630)

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Mark A. Palmer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; John B. Hudson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

break the ice. Inthis project they were required to work together. Students who may have been shy, orreluctant to work with others, seemed to become willing to work with others. While the team-building exercise was successful, the students need to be challenged immediately. We did thisby introducing challenging problems where the correct solution may not have beenimmediately apparent early in the course. Team Dynamics While many teams worked well together, there were some problems. In some cases thestudents worked these out on their own. One student on a weak team proceeded to move towork with a neighboring team and eventually changed teams. In another case, after someprodding by the instructors, a

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Ph.D., Richard H. Turpin

your lessons. Common violations of the law of the teacher include an attempt by the teacher to bluff his/her lesson,assuming the students are “ignorant” of the material; assuming that it is the students, alone, who must study thematerial, and not the teacher; to scan the lesson in preparation for the class, then assume that even though notthoroughly mastered enough is known to “fill the period,” perhaps supplementing with random talk about a petresearch project; and failing to find personal stimulation in the lesson.III. The Law of the Learner “The learner must attend with interest the material to be learned.” Good luck! With a class of 10students, perhaps, but let’s be real

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael S. Leonard; Donald E. Beasley; D. Jack Elzinga

1.134.4 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings1. Preparation: Identify a group of faculty members (and staff members, if desired) who will serve asparticipants in the strategic planning process. Note that if strategic planning is being done solely for curricularpurposes, this planning group could be, but does not have to be, the CDT. From this group, select four teams(with two to four individuals on each team) to address the following questions and to develop summaries of theirobservations and findings: a. What are the organization's strengths and weaknesses? b. What future projections can be made concerning the practice of the discipline(s) taught in the

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Clifford Bragdon; Carl Berkowitz

college enrollments were women. By 1990, the number rose to 55 percent. Of theestimated 13.7 million students, 7.5 million are women, and 6.2 million are men. Projections by the IJ. S.Department of Education are that over 8 million women will be enrolled in U.S. colleges by 1995. By the year2005, women may constitute over 60 percent of college enrollments. By the year 2005, an expected 71.4 millionwomen will be in the labor force, reaching an all-time high participation rate of 63 percent. More women will beworking, and their share of the total labor force will rise from 45.3 percent in 1990 to 47.7 percent in 2005. Theparticipation rate, or the number of women who are available and are working in the labor pool, is expected to riseto 63 percent

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard Parker; Walter Buchanan

professionals usewhen it comes to solving the given problem or project. By providing that kind of a learning environment, eachstudent’s learning productivity will be enhanced. The Classroom/Lab Environment An integrated lecture/lab/computer room was designed to accomplish the educational goals ofintegrating concepts delivered primarily via the lecture mode with hands-on learning in a traditional electronicslab. The computer acts as the “glue” between these two modes, facilitating through simulation the transitionfrom concept to competency. In a room which could accommodate forty students, there are ten lab stations.Initially, we thought that the computers should be placed right beside the other instruments

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Hussein M. Yaghi

subjeets was also limited, and so was the amount of time dedicated for that. Therefore, longer and more frequent access time slots should be thought of when planning for computer education programs. Perhaps Lebanon is having a special opportunity to rebuild its educational system now with the huge reconstruction projects taking place in many domains after the cease of the civil war. The government has plans to renovate the educational system, and these plans should address the Page 1.112.5 technology related issues.... . . .. ‘..~J.&

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Alan K. Karplus

Robert Chhugani, a Western New England Collegeincoming Senior Mechanical Engineering student and from Mathew and Jeff Kolb, brothers and local Springfield,MA highschool students, Their endeavor and comments were valuable and greatly appreciated.ALAN K. KARPLUSAlan K. Karplus is Professor of ME at Western New England College, Springfield, Massachusetts. He has aBSME from Tufts, an MS from Iowa State Univ. and a PhD from Colorado State Univ. He has beeninvolved with the Freshman Engineering, Junior and Senior Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, teachesMaterials Science and supervises Senior Projects. He is a member of ASME, ASEE and ASM International

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Joan A. Burtner; Benjamin S. Kelley; Allen F. Grum

of the two primary fall term courses to enhance the cohesivenessof the AIMS students. On the first day of class each student was given a notebook and tee shirt printed withthe AIMS and university logos. During the fall term all of the AIMS students and participating faculty gatheredfor dinner in one of the faculty homes. Near the end of the academic year, we held a graduation ceremony andpresented each currently enrolled AIMS student a certificate of achievement. Other out-of-class activities scheduled individually and associated with the AIMS chemistry courseincluded participating in a service project to scrape old paint off a community child-learning center, attending a

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Susan B. Millar; Steve Kosciuk; John C. Wright; Debra Penberthy

the effects of the revised course on students, Wright was very impressed. As he put it, I was blown away by the phenomenal creativity and competence some of these students brought to course projects. They had a deep command of the material, and could apply it in different contexts in very creative ways. In short, student performance was at a level far above what I’ d seen before. The Need for Assessment Upon describing his students’ learning outcomes to his faculty colleagues, Wright found themgenerally supportive but not interested in trying the SAL approach themselves. He realized that many of -his colleagues were unconvinced that teaching methods

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Karen L. Tonso

discussions focuses on how little time can be devoted to their design work because ofthe time demands of their other, non-design classes. In addition, I interview students from the design classes inprivate where they again report that time constraints and pressure to do well in their core engineering classes limittheir design-class work. When I complete the larger research project, I will be better equipped to explain just howthese two kinds of classes interact while students are developing engineering identities.ReferencesTonso, K. L. (in progress). Constructing engineers through practice: Gendered features of learning and identity development. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.Tonso, K. L. (1993). Becoming engineers while working collaboratively

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Frank Wicks

into a single turbine. Another would be to similar opportunities for the next century. Page 1.429.5 replace the relatively small turbiie driven compressor with an engine belt driven piston compressor simiiar Conference Proceedings , .AeknowledgemenL FMNK WICKS The author thanks the Niagara Mohawk Power Professor Frank Wicks received a BMarineE fromCorporation for the energy related projects grant that SUNY Maritime in 1%1, a

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Troy E. Kostek

availablesupervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) package as the client.Case Studv 1- The CIM Atmlication During the Fall 1994 semester, the instructor introduced a special laboratory assignment into a senior-level Computer-Integrated Manufacturing Technology (CIMT) course entitled “Manufacturing Networks.”The fundamental goal of this course is to teach how data communications and LANs are used to integrate -manufacturing operations at the shop floor level. The laboratory assignment, called the CIM application,was assigned at the end of the semester and was designed to pull together the material presented from dayone of the semester into one relatively complex project. The CIM application forced students to link togethermultiple shop floor

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Gary E. Wnek; C. T. Moynihan; Mark A. Palmer; John B. Hudson

1.516.11References1. Wnek G. and Ficalora P.: Chemistry of Materials Course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ; Internal Document2. Ecker J. G. and Boyce W. E.: The Computer Oriented Calculus Course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ; accepted for publication in The College Mathematics Journal 6/94.3. Redish E. F., Wilson J. M. and McDaniel C. K.: The CUPLE Project: A Hyper- and Multimedia Approach to Restructuring Physics Education ; In Proceedings of the MIT Conference on Hypermedia in Education, MIT Press 1992.4. 3DOPHU0$+XGVRQ-%0R\QLKDQ&7:QHN*(8VLQJWKH,QWHUQHWLQD )UHVKPDQ(QJLQHHULQJ&RXUVH3UHVHQWHGDW§&KDQJLQJWKH3DUDGLJPLQ0DWHULDOV (GXFDWLRQ¨:RUNVKRSRQ0DWHULDOV(GXFDWLRQ056)DOO5. Palmer M., Bell J: Teaching

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Michael J. Pavelich; Barbara Olds

Conference Proceedings Page 1.28.4Table 2 - Freshmen Work Collected Table 3 - Senior Work Collected, Dept X- project team report Comm,CT - design team report Tech,Comm,CT- humanities class report Comm,CT,HSS - seminar essay Comm,HSS- oral report video Comm - design oral report video Comm- final exams in calculus, - final exams in select courses

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Stefanie L. Lozito; Karen M. Bursic; Cynthia Atman

objective of the larger study is to documentstudent problem solving processes by obtaining detailed descriptions of those processes. In this paper, we showhow this objective is obtained by demonstrating the usefulness of verbal protocol analysis through a detailedapplication of the method to one subject in our study. The Experiment In this study, students were asked to give a verbal protocol as they solved a playground design problem.This problem is a revised version of a term-long design project used by the University of Maryland (part of theNational Science Foundation’s ECSEL coalition)(5). The text of the problem is presented in Figure 1. The experimental procedure consisted of several

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

Benjamin 'Quincy' Cabell VI; Javed Alam; Joseph Rencis, University of Arkansas

locatedat distant locations. The number of users and Internet hosts are growing at an exponential rate and there does notappear to be an end in sight. The Internet offers a great potential for the rapid, cost effective exchange ofmassive amounts of information. The introduction of hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) used in the currentWorld-Wide Web (WWW, or the Web [1, 2]) project allows the FEMur development team to createinformation material in hypermedia format. It is a combination of Hypertext [3, 4] and multimedia. It allows oneto combine information from such diverse sources as plain text, pictures, sound clips and animation/video clipsto-create hypermedia documents using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). These documents are placedon a

Collection

1996 Annual Conference

Authors

William T. Brazelton

Engineers (SHPE).We responded with an eagerness to see that this did happen and in a successful way. Our support took thesame “transparent” form as with NSBE. The McCormick Undergraduate Engineering Office providesoffice space, clerical and office help to SHPE as they carry out their projects. In the brief period of theirexistence, SHPE has displayed the same sort ofvigor and sense of direction that NSBE had earlier. It is somewhat early to evaluate SHPE and itscontribution to its membership and the school but since it was formed, Hispanic enrollment has increasedin engineering. This may be seen in Fig. 1 which also presents the total minority Fig.2 - Women in Engine ering