expected and integrated part of the engineering curriculum.BackgroundIn the fall of 2004, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, a medium-size state university, beganintegration of service-learning (S-L) projects into required engineering courses within fiveundergraduate academic departments. The goal was to have students exposed to S-L in onaverage one course in each of eight semesters during their engineering program with anoverarching aim to graduate better engineers and more engaged citizens. Previous papers havesummarized earlier results 1-16.The original motivation for attempting this service-learning program was rooted in the findings ofclassic studies in which service-learning was shown to be effective in a large number of cognitiveand
25.1474.2students’ perceptions of the learning environment significantly impacted learning. Students whoparticipated in SI sessions indicated that academic support programs like SI played a key role infostering effective learning of course material and in promoting a spirit of joyful learning.1 Researchers in physics education have found that students’ attitudes toward learningsignificantly impact what students actually learn.3-7 Several instruments, including the MarylandPhysics Expectations Survey (MPEX),4 Views About Science Survey (VASS),5 theEpistemological Beliefs Assessment (EBAPS),6 and the Colorado Learning Attitudes aboutScience Survey (CLASS)7 were designed to assess students’ attitudes toward learning. Resultsfrom extensive survey studies
, in academic institutions with honor codes or otherwise centralizedrules for such cases this process may not be available or allowed.The following are several recommendations for success. 1. Do have persons of authority oversee the independent study. This demonstrates the importance placed on the exercise and can be a humbling for the student and allows an opportunity for one on one mentoring. 2. Do make the assignment meaningful and ordered so that the students know what is expected. In this case the work required was to evaluate a topic, write an outline, a final paper, and a presentation. 3. It is important to impress upon the students early that it will be an easy class to fail if they are irresponsible
expenditure of the federal budget in Fiscal 2010. Social Securityaccounted for 20.3% of the budget, compared to 23.6% for discretionary defense and 20.8% forMedicare/Medicaid.1 Thus, analysis of the program is a full-time job for many, as well as beingthe subject of ongoing political discourse.Nevertheless, at the level of personal decision-making much of the available information doesnot seem to properly consider the time value of money. Since how to properly consider that timevalue is the subject of engineering economy courses, the topic is a suitable one for a case study.More importantly, like a real world problem, analyzing this case study can require students tosearch out the needed information from many possible sources, read and understand
time asa practitioner (which we refer to as ‘gap years’). Key demographic data for the participants isgiven in Table 1. Page 25.1477.4 Table 1. Demographic Data for Study Participants Graduate Field Pseudonym Gender Age Gap Years Current Status of Study Third year PhD Mechanical Andrew Male 33 7
core engineering courses,regardless of their major, to graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree. An earlier ASEE paper[1] explored the basic pedagogy developed by the Air Force Academy’s Department of Electricaland Computer Engineering to overcome the inherent challenges of teaching non-engineers “toengineer.” This paper explores the measure of success for those efforts based on tangiblefeedback and assessment data. Furthermore, the paper specifically addresses a monumentalchallenge beyond educating the students: motivating them to care about their learning. Variousapproaches are discussed and solutions graded on their success or failure. A representativesyllabus is included at the end of this paper.IntroductionHistory is rife with famous
students’ assumptions and interactions withtheir clients resulted in four major themes. 1. Assumptions 2. Impact 3. Motivation 4. Understanding client needsIn the first theme, Assumptions, students often expressed thoughts on what they believed to bethe intent of what their clients were thinking and about their abilities. Thoughts on clientassumptions included, for example, a student-centered view of their clients, “he would want us toenjoy the project.” Thoughts on client abilities included an assumption of the lack of anengineering background, “We assumed she had little to no engineering background,” yet alsoassumed some knowledge of the problem to be addressed. This knowledge was explicitlyacknowledged after meeting with their
). Sample projects withaccompanying KSBs have been validated and tested with students22. WISEngineering builds from the informed engineering design pedagogical approach toprovide an explicit design cycle to guide students’ design projects (Figure 1): Clarifying design specifications and constraints – design challenges have particular specifications and constraints to consider in developing a solution. Typical constraints emphasized in projects include time or cost. Specifications can emphasize particular concepts to be learned during the project, for instance, certain volume and surface area constraints require students to develop and apply their understandings of these concepts
S facultty. The gendder compositiion of STEM M departments d aat SU for thee most part aare below national n levell statistics w with women cconcentratedd in fields fi of studdy relating too health, life sciences, annd communicatiion (Chart 1)). Despite thhe grassroots Chart 1: S&E S Faculty by
systems in the Middle East where higher educationinstitutions constitute a prosperous source of fresh engineers for the Gulf region and it isregarded as an engineering educational center in the Middle East7, 8. The enrollment offemale in the engineering program in Lebanon9 between 2005 and 2010 fluctuatedbetween 15.2% and 18.2% with a mean of 16.5 as shown in Table 1. Female Male Total %Female 2009-2010 2087 9356 11443 18.2 2008-2009 1753 8223 9976 17.5 2007-2008 1426 7751 9177 15.5 2006-2007 1230 6873 8103 15.2 2005-2006 1259
peersand with faculty as a major attraction of the program. The department has also set up WiMEscholarships to prospective high school students to enhance recruitment and also employspersonalized phone calls from the department chair to all women applicants to highlight theprogram. Since the launch of the WiME program the women enrollment in the ME program hasincreased from 76 to 128 women (7.0% to 10%).1. IntroductionWith the changing demographics of the nation and state of the engineering workforce, theunderrepresentation of women among engineering undergraduates and the subsequent lack offemales in the workforce is a subject of national concern1-3. Studies show that about 20% ofengineering baccalaureate degrees are awarded to women, which is
almost 15,000 students through our 160 plus programs ofstudy. Although approximately 94 % of our students are undergraduates, Western is also hometo several outstanding masters-level graduate programs within the CST. The student-to-facultyratio is 21:1, and the retention rate for the second year is relatively high at 84%. This academicyear Western admitted 2700 freshman and 1300 new transfer students. The academic units ofthe University consist of seven colleges and the Graduate School. The Principal Investigators(PIs) on our ADVANCE Catalyst program were: the Dean and the Associate Dean of the CSTand the Vice Provost for Equal Opportunity and Employment Diversity.Western’s Equal Opportunity (EO) Office assists faculty, staff and students by
introduce our female faculty to the skills and criterianecessary to become a leader.This paper will focus on content development, participant selection, and the topical informationto be included in the program. The program was developed by the faculty that attended thecertificate program. Participants were selected based on how the program could potentiallybenefit them as seeking leadership positions on campus. For our first offering of the program,we are focusing on six major topics. 1. Personal Branding – helping female faculty determine their personal brand and making it work for them. 2. Life Balance – how female faculty can balance the workload of their job while also being wife, mother, daughter, sister, etc. 3
occupies. The goal is to learn howto intelligently map DSP algorithms to FPGA hardware.Course Practical ExercisesThe practical design exercises given in this course illustrate several aspects of DSP for FPGAdesign. They include key concepts, architectures, applications, and the cost and performancemetrics which must often be traded off by hardware designers. The suite of Xilinx software toolsare used to support this process through all steps from design entry to implementation on aFPGA-based development board. The following is a brief description of each exercise.Exercise 1: This exercise deals with the arithmetic operations required for DSPs.Implementation of both fixed and floating point operations on signed numbers are explored andthe hardware
Evaluation1.IntroductionThe Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America, stretching nearly 300 km long andpossessing a watershed spanning parts of six Mid-Atlantic States and more that 165,700 km3. Itis a vital resource to more than 16 million people that live in its watershed and beyond, providingfood, jobs, habitat, recreation, and other benefits. It is, however, a fragile resource madeespecially vulnerable to eutrophication (nutrient-enrichment) due to its long dendritic shorelineand the many human activities that are prevalent. These include high concentrations ofagricultural activities as well as several major population centers3, 10. Additionally, theChesapeake Bay has a large ratio of watershed area to estuarine area, (14.3:1) which
engineering. So, in 2009 Sapling Learningbegan to develop online homework for chemical engineering’s material and energy balancescourse to sell in 2010. In addition to the lack of competition, the decision to develop a materialand energy balances course was made for a few reasons. First, online, randomized homeworkwould be useful for a course where the largest market share textbook hasn’t been revised since2005[1] and contains many of the same homework questions as the previous edition from the Page 25.1488.21980’s. As textbooks remain on the market, the number of students having worked eachproblems increases, which also leads to an increase in the
traditional virtual environment, computingrequirements can quickly escalate. Some modern system requirements are listed in Table 1.As can be seen in Table 1, utilizing just four operating systems could require as much as 3.7 GHzof CPU, 3.25 GB of RAM and 40 GB of hard drive space, in addition to the reqirements of thehost operating system; this is beyond the means of the average student system. Though computercapacity grows over time, so do the operating system and application software requirements.2.1. Proposed ArchitectureThe proposed system architecture listed in Figure 1 is one of many ways an IDPS can beimplemented within a virtualized environment. The system includes one student environmentand one instructor environment and they act as attacker
publication that informs our current discussion is HowPeople Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School1.An organizing structure used in the How People Learn volumes (hereafter HPL) is the HPLframework. In particular, it suggests that we ask about the degree to which learningenvironments are1-4:1. Knowledge centered. In the sense of being based on a careful analysis of what we want people to know and be able to do when they finish with our materials or course and providing them with the foundational knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for successful transfer.2. Learner centered. In the sense of connecting to the strengths, interests, and preconceptions of learners and helping them learn about themselves as learners
engineering science classes asa method of helping students see a “correct” solution procedure for the assigned problems. Thiswork-in-progress reports on an initial investigation into providing homework solutions indifferent media. Specifically, homework solutions are presented as static screenshots of acompleted analysis (Treatment 1) and annotated videos of the analysis being developed(Treatment 2). Student performance on a pre/post Statics Concept Inventory is used as ameasure of the effectiveness of the two different homework solution treatments. Treatment 1 hasbeen administered once and Treatment 2 has not been administered at all, so this paper ispresented as a work in progress.Background/Justification The pedagogical theories that
syllabus. One of the mainobjectives is to teach students from novice to expert users preparing them with adequate fluidmechanics fundamentals and hands-on CFD project works to prepare for their capstone designprojects, higher education and advanced research in fluid mechanics. We have planned toincorporate a CFD educational interface for hands-on student experience in fluid mechanics,which reflects real-world engineering applications used in companies, government research labs,and higher education research.1. IntroductionComputational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been included as a senior-level Thermal-FluidsEngineering course in the curriculum of mechanical engineering program at many USuniversities. In some universities, this course is adopted in
include a course management system (Moodle embedded in NEEShub), WebEx video conferencing, and a 3D virtual world called QuakeQuest. For the online interaction to be most effective, students 1) need to understand why they are using the tools, and 2) be coached in how to critique each other’s work and contribute to threaded discussions.IntroductionThe George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) networkconsists of 14 large-scale earthquake engineering laboratories, housed at universities across theUS. These laboratories provide research hubs for large-scale earthquake engineering research inthe areas of structures, soils, and tsunamis and are linked together with a sophisticatedcyberinfrastructure. Each site
animationtechnologies, the new courseware and programming learning modules can: (1) makeprogramming interesting while retaining the underlying contents; (2) visualize programminglogic and memory change; make abstract and intricate concepts “visible” and “touchable”, andthereby, easy to understand; and (3) foster self-study, stimulate critical thinking, and improvestudents’ learning effectiveness outside class meetings. The goal is to ensure that computermajoring students, especially freshman and sophomores, can develop correct understanding ofprogramming concepts. To better organize the courseware, a training system is implemented tomanage the learning modules and support online access. A summary of the programming topics,courses impacted, and samples of the
through this processthe website can aid in the proliferation of effective learning of PV across the globe, andpotentially aid new and well established engineering domains as they begin to embrace e-learning technology as learning resources.Introduction Over the last 20 years, the field of Photovolatics (PV), the research, design, andconstruction of devices that harnesses and convert the sun’s energy into electricity, has seen 40%annual compound growth.1 To maintain that growth world-wide, skilled engineers who arefamiliar with PV design, manufacturing, and materials are essential. In the US, the developmentof and growth in the PV manufacturing sector will require an exponential growth of the numberof engineers we train in PV manufacturing
university “ASU ID”) is customizable andincludes apps that we developed at our university from the ground up for STEM education. Wenote that previous attempts to create customized portals for universities have also been attemptedby mobile communications service providers to expand their student customer base on collegecampuses (example shown in Figure 1).The difference in our effort is that we include and customize not only the usualsports/entertainment and university service/access apps but we focus specifically on includingSTEM oriented apps (see Figure 2), some of which were created as part of an NSF project. Forexample we created an Android app for performing mathematical and signal analysis simulationson Android smart phones and tablets. We
Page 25.1497.3provided with tablet PCs for the duration of the class, which enabled them to could the instructor.The Instructional Technology Team redesigned some of their training modules based on the ALTand the VARK model as well as informal feedback from previous course enrollees.The newer training module consisted of two 1- hour sessions (as shown in Table 1), separated bya short break. Tablet PCs were provided to all trainees for the length of the course. Detailedhandouts were also provided to all the trainees to accommodate reading/writing learners. Thefirst half of the course followed a traditional lecture type training module, with one instructor andseveral ‘students’ to accommodate auditory learners. The instructor used PowerPoint
. Page 25.1498.1 c American Society for Engineering Education, 2012 Workforce Communication Instruction: Preliminary Inter-rater Reliability Data for an Executive-based Oral Communication RubricAbstractWe have conducted a preliminary study to measure the degree of agreement among differentraters (inter-rater reliability) for an executive-based scoring rubric used to rate oral engineeringstudent presentations on 19 skills. We explore the question: do different raters give the samefeedback on the same presentation? We have collected scores from raters in three differentcontexts: (1) the researchers and teaching assistants rating videotaped presentations fromcapstone
Collaboratively Among Universities – a Dense Network ApproachIn “To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late ModernWorld,” author James Davison Hunter espouses the idea that the engine for driving change invirtually any context is in dense networks. According to Hunter, a dense network is defined as amechanism for change.1 According to Sarah Miller Caldicott, grand niece of Thomas Edison andthe Founder/CEO of Power Patterns of Innovation, “A dense network includes a handful of keycomponents including a passionate focus, diverse skills and competencies related to thepassionate focus, a robust outreach network, the desire to disrupt unneeded orthodoxies in coreinstitutions, and – perhaps most importantly – an
curriculum 1, 2, 3. We have had positive assessment results from our ownpilot testing at Rowan University and with the use of some of the materials in the FreshmanChemical Engineering course at the State University of New York-Stony Brook 4. We havedisseminated some of our results through ASEE conference papers, and some of the problem setsdescribed in this paper will be used in the next edition of Felder, Rousseau and Newell,Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes, 4th ed 5.Our current efforts are to expand our dissemination through the ASEE Chemical EngineeringDivision (CHED) Summer School. This will help extend the reach of our materials to anaudience of educators early in their careers who will be able to directly impact the students
teachers through the proposal process, conducted proposal-writing workshops; Co-facilitator (2004), Boston East Pipeline Network; and Alumni, Lead Boston 2004 (The National Conference for Community and Justice). She won the 2006 Northeastern University Aspiration Award, and was recognized at the 2003 Northeastern University Reception honoring Principal Investigators that obtained funding in excess of $1 million over a five-year period.Daniel Sullivan, Northeastern University Daniel Sullivan has a B.S. in civil engineering and has worked for the Center for STEM Education since 2010.Ms. Lauren Horn, Northeastern UniversityDr. Charles A. Dimarzio, Northeastern University
. Page 25.1502.1 c American Society for Engineering Education, 2012 YouTube: An Effective CAD Training Resource1. IntroductionThis paper is a continuation of my research in the area of web-based CAD training. Phase I(Ethicomp2008 conferencei) of my research was where I addressed the “Feasibility of Web-Based Training for CAD”. Phase II (Ethicomp2010 conferenceii) of my research was “Whatis Quality Web-Based CAD Training”. This paper is organized in the following order: 1.Introduction, 2. Overview of this Research, 3. Methodology, 4. Results/Data, 5.Conclusionand Future Direction followed by References. Section 2 (Overview of this Research)describes the main motivation behind my research.2. Overview