Conference Session

Advancing Thermal Science Education

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Jeremy Losaw; Ann Anderson

participate in the SAE sponsored Mini Baja or Formula Competitions whichare seen as an effective way to motivate students to learn (see for instance Rencis, 1999 or Morrisand Fry, 2001). Another example is a program at the University of South Carolina which uses aninstrumented Legends-class race car in a capstone mechanical engineering course to teach studentsto develop a systems approach to problem solving (Lyons and Young, 2001; and Lyons Morehouseand Young, 1999). Several schools such as the Milwaukee School of Engineering (Musto andHoward, 2001; Musto, Howard and Rather, 2000), and the University of Arizona (Umashankar etal, 2001) report using racecar design in outreach programs to high school students. In addition anumber of schools now offer

Conference Session

Freshman Curriculum Development

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Rita Caso; Jeff Froyd; Jan Rinehart; Ahmer Inam; Ann Kenimer; Carolyn Clark; Jim Morgan

learning communitieshave grown during the 1990s as documented by the work by Gabelnick et. al. 3 and the NationalLearning Communities project. 4 As evidenced by the diversity of implementations of learningcommunities in engineering curricula across the Foundation Coalition, learning communitiesprovide a concept that can be adopted and adapted by many different engineering programs tooffer increased support for the students who are enrolled in very challenging programs.At A&M, a LC is a group of students, faculty and industry that have common interests and workas partners to improve the engineering educational experience. LCs value diversity, areaccessible to all interested individuals, and bring real world situations into the

Conference Session

Design and Innovation

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Robin Adams; Pimpida Punnakanta; Craig D. Lewis; Cynthia Atman

their design activities may differ significantly from their actualperformance in solving “messy” open-ended problems. In the Pacific Northwest, multi-university participants in aNational Science Foundation supported project (Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education, TIDEE)have implemented and disseminated a Mid-Program Assessment instrument for assessing engineering studentdesign competency. One part of the instrument requires student teams to document (e.g., self-report) their designdecisions and processes while engaged in a design task. These written self-reports are scored using a rubric thathas demonstrated a high inter-rater reliability. We are interested in comparing the scores derived from these self-reports with measures of