Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Andy S. Peng; Robert Nelson; Cheng Liu; Ahmet Turkmen; Wei Shi; Jia-Ling Lin

applying a hybrid instructional model to a newlydeveloped computer engineering course at UW–Stout, which includes the delivery of onlinelectures through streaming videos combined with bi-weekly in-class lectures as well as hands-onlaboratory exercises related to the course material. The design of this curriculum follows aframework that was developed to fulfill the course requirements. In addition to traditional classsettings, the course also implements a team project which has several reporting components tomonitor students’ learning progress. Multiple in-class surveys were conducted throughout thesemester to obtain course feedback from the students. The instructor also constantly solicitedand collected student comments about the course during the

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Majura F. Selekwa

remain limited to the type of microcontroller taught in class. A recentsurvey paper has indicated that 13 while mechanical engineering students have been increasinglybecoming more interested in microcontrollers, they also have been left blind on the hardwarestructure common to all microcontrollers, as such students have been always looking at the finalend use of particular microcontrollers only. The objective of this paper is to provide some guidelines for instructors who teach the subjectof microcontrollers to students who do not have the electrical, electronics or computer engineer-ing background; particularly those in mechanical and chemical engineering. Although thesestudents learn the basic principles of electrical circuit analysis in

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bakr M. Aly Ahmed; Mike Christenson; David A. Crutchfield

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0044 Expanding the Learning Experience: The Integration of Technology into Architectural Education Bakr M. Aly Ahmed, Ph.D. North Dakota State University Mike Christenson North Dakota State University David A. Crutchfield North Dakota State UniversityAbstractWith the recent academic emphasis on STEM fields, the integration of digital technologies intothe educational process has become a national and institutional

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Annamalai Pandian

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0002Transforming senior students to Competent Engineers through Project Based Learning Dr. Annamalai Pandian Assistant Professor University of Wisconsin-Stout Menomonie, WI 54751 USAAbstractThis paper focus on transforming the senior level engineering students to competentmanufacturing engineers thru project based learning. The final project work for themanufacturing system design and simulation (MFGE-440) course is geared toward challengingthe students to develop a detailed

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

J. E. Johnson; L. Stradins; S Springer; R. Asthana

communication engagements. Outlined below are initialexperiences of dissemination of the results from the Holtby academic endowment and relatedactive-learning initiatives.The engineering and technology department delivers the technical coursework for undergraduatestudents seeking degrees in computer engineering, engineering technology, manufacturing 21 engineering, packaging, and plastics engineering. In addition, graduate courses are offered for the customized master’s degree in manufacturing engineering both on-campus and on-line. The department has hosted an open house for the general public at the conclusion of each of the last three semesters that showcased senior design and development projects

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Nannan He; Gale Allen; Cameron Johnson

decreasing and the emphasis on research and journalpublications for tenure and promotion is increasing. At MSU Mankato state and industry supporthas come together with faculty interest for the past several years in the areas of automationengineering and manufacturing. Courses in industrial automation involving PLC’s, sensors, andactuators have been taught since 2006 using hands-on active learning techniques. An effort isunderway to increase the technical depth and broaden the training by exploring deterministictiming and modeling in complex real-time automation systems using traditional PLC and PC-based PLC equipment and future, large multicore computer designs.1. IntroductionIn Spring 2006, a laboratory and courses were first created for training

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Aurenice M. Oliveira

” approach and is widelyapplicable and is practiced in many fields, especially by engineers. The advantages of theoutside-in approach, includes the motivation to students. Students, especially non-majors, wantto appreciate why they are putting effort into learning a specific material that at first doesn’tappear related to their majors. They need a better answer than, “Because you will need it later.”The author has follow an approach consistent to the top-down approach, where the application isbriefly discussed first and the teaching of the basic principles follows. For instance, to tailor agiven topic to Computer Network & System Administration students, the author talks about theneed for different cables to carry out binary data at different

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Nannan He; Han-Way Huang

derived manually from high-level models. Multiple large EU-funded research projects havebeen initiated to promote the application of MBD in industry, and target at solving the challengesencountered in different real-world application domains 2, 3, 4.This paper presents our experience of integrating the MBD knowledge into a ProgrammingTools (PT) course. This course is an elective for junior and senior computer engineering orelectrical engineering students. Before taking this course, students have already had someprogramming experience. They have already learned to enter, compile, run, test, and debugprograms. The objectives of the course include teaching students modern programming tools,and their usage in the design and implementation of

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Jerry Gao; Lianbo Zhu

focusing more on textbook theories than onindustry professional skills. This paper studies the different approaches in developing students’professional skills in the classroom by working together with engineering firms. It is believedthat such a study can provide a vision for engineering management education that can betterprovide for students in the industry. These approaches can be applied to many similarengineering management programs.IntroductionConstruction has become a profession from the traditional civil engineering. In this industry, allnew hires are still expected to have the fundamentals of engineering theory and knowledge;however, it requires much less designing and computing capacity. Instead, it requires morehands-on professional

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Christopher R. Carroll

will ease the most common difficulty faced by students, namely knowingwhether registers in the processor are 8-bit or 16-bit registers, and knowing whether a particularinstruction uses 8-bit or 16-bit operands. Confusion on this point has been the single mostcommon difficulty faced by students when learning to use the S12 processor. The 8-bit nature ofthe ATmega32 should eliminate this source of confusion. Processing power is not an issue withthe kinds of applications students face in the microcontroller course, so the 8-bit nature of theATmega32 over the 16-bit S12 is actually a pedagogical advantage.Second, the S12 is clearly a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) device, whereas theATmega32 is clearly a Reduced Instruction Set Computer

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Cristinel Ababei; Anca M. Miron

% − ofwomen in electrical and computer engineering fields. Its goal is to address this gender gapproblem by exposing women to electrical engineering at an earlier age, thereby fosteringexcitement about pursuing careers in electrical engineering and higher confidence in theirmath, science, and problem-solving skills. Designed for the duration of one week, the campactivities include hands-on microcontroller based projects using Arduino boards, classdiscussions, meetings with female professors and students, and tours of local high-techcompanies. Utilizing entry and exit questionaires, we found that 50% of the participantsfelt empowered and declared that they wanted to become electrical engineers. We alsodiscuss several suggestions for improving future

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Majura F. Selekwa

microcon-trollers, and features that distinguish them from the well known personal computers. The material covered in the second level combined various elements learned in the first levelinto more meaningful microcontroller based mechatronic systems. Students were subjected to 294 Engineering Measurements Theory LEVEL 1 −Sensors −Filters and Amplifiers Basic Elements of Mechatronic Systems Electrical Circuits Sensors and

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Han-Way Huang; Nannan He

the program,setting breakpoints, and examining register and memory contents.Altera provides several well-designed FPGA boards for users to learn how to use their FPGAdesign software and the device. Among them, the DE1 and DE2-115 are most suitable forlearning the Altera design software and experimenting with the FPGA devices. The DE1 is lessexpensive and is based on the Cycle II device whereas the DE2-115 is based on the Cyclone IVdevice with more hardware resources. Both the DE1 and DE2-115 have been used by manyuniversities worldwide in teaching digital design and computer organization courses.Altera provide a tutorial on Qsys [6] and lab assignments for users to get started with embeddedsystem design using the Nios II soft processor

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Reza Fazel-Rezai; Sima Noghanian; Ahmed Rabbi

software that isused widely in engineering courses such as Numerical Analysis, Signal Processing,Modeling of Dynamical Systems, Control Systems, Digital Control, Adaptive andNonlinear Control, Biomedical Engineering, Antenna Theory, Transmission Lines,Electromagnetics, Computer Vision, Digital Image Processing, Chemical ProcessControl, Communication Theory, Wireless Systems, etc. MATLAB is very user friendly,easy to learn, and very powerful for engineering and math applications. Many real-worldapplications in engineering can be modeled, simulated and demonstrated by MATLAB.Many engineering textbooks now include examples based on MATLAB. Therefore, thissoftware was chosen as the primary programming language for the MAT-ME camp.There are various

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Han-Way Huang; Nannan He

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0039 Teaching the ARM Microcontroller to Keep Up with the Embedded Industry Technology Change Department of Electrical, Computer Engineering and Technology Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN 56001 Han-Way Huang, han-way.huang@mnsu.edu Nannan He, nannan.he@mnsu.eduAbstractThe widespread use of mobile devices in the last decade has changed the embedded systemindustry. Mobile devices require the embedded microcontroller to have high performance andlow power. The winner is the ARM-based processor. In 2011, 7.9 billion ARM processors

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Nannan He

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0049 Incorporating On-going Verification & Validation Research to a Reliable Real-Time Embedded Systems Course Nannan He Department of Electrical, Computer Engineering and Technology Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN 56001AbstractThis paper presents the enhancements to a senior-level and graduate-level course, Reliable Real-time Embedded Systems, in terms of introducing advanced verification and validation (V&V)approaches. Traditionally, this course covers the topics of fundamental principles in real-timeoperation systems like

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Francis Peloubet; Eakalak Khan; G. Padmanabhan

. 168Usage of CAD drawings, word-processors and PowerPoint software were required for preparingreports and presentations2.1996-2002 In this period, two more goals were added to the already developed goals of the course sinceits inception:1. To provide students with an opportunity to interact with the community and seek their feedback; and2. To provide an opportunity to develop life-long learning habits and skills to relate seemingly unrelated ideas and integrate them in the overall design. The Civil Engineering Department started using community-based projects in the capstonecourse to emphasize the importance of community integration in the civil engineering profession.Real-life projects for the course are carefully selected from the

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Kevin Craig

electronics. Theory and bestindustry practice must be in balance when mastering these skills. Presently, we devote separatecourses to each skill and somehow think that learning each skill very well will somehowmagically enable the student to critically think and integrate all to solve a real-world problem.This approach is ineffective. As a result, the ABET-required senior capstone multidisciplinarydesign course too often becomes a design-build-test exercise with the emphasis on just gettingsomething done. Students rarely break out of their disciplinary comfort zone and thus fail toexperience true multidisciplinary, model-based system design. Two courses were created toaddress this. Electromechanical Engineering Systems (2nd-year) and

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Steven Buchhop; Tate Carlson; Evan Edwards; Prakash Ranganathan; Reza Fazel-Rezai

gathers basic information through various sensors and allows control of devices or loads status ofdifferent devices from any computer remotely. Sensors are able to collect data and organize it into an efficient manner for thehome owner to process and internet monitoring allows for easy accessibility. A LabVIEW based software interface withremote access enables users to monitor and control appliances and status activities of daily living in their homes for greaterindependence and improved quality of life. The success of technical framework discussed in this capstone project will benefitthe engineering educators.Keywords – LabVIEW, Capstone Project, Household Energy, Real-Time MonitoringI. BACKGROUND OF SENIOR DESIGN COURSES AND SYSTEM OVERVIEW

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Roger Green

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0028 Rethinking Engineering Education Through a Leadership Perspective Roger Green (Roger.Green@ndsu.edu) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering North Dakota State UniversityAbstractMany traditional engineering education environments operate according to an authority modelwhere teachers (the authority) seek to educate students (the subordinates). Although thepresence of an authority does not necessarily imply that an education system is authoritarian,teachers operating under an authority model often apply

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Cory J. Prust; Stephen M. Williams

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0027 Senior Design: The Swiss Army Knife of the Curriculum Cory J. Prust and Stephen M. Williams Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Milwaukee School of Engineering 1025 N. Broadway Milwaukee, WI 53202 prust@msoe.edu,williams@msoe.eduAbstractOver the years, senior design courses in engineering curricula have been subject to numerousinternal and external driving forces. Widespread adoption of senior design capstone experienceswas dictated by

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Zhiyuan Yang; Hope L. Weiss; Matthew J. Traum

turbine hardware is available, specialized dynamometer and data acquisition equipment areneeded to evaluate performance. Alternatively, virtual laboratories can offer rich simulatedexperiences to promote learning, but they lack the stimulating tactile and tangible learningexperiences applied experiments provide.We describe a method to accurately measure and predict the mechanical power output of a gasturbine using the rational inertia of the turbine’s spinning components and friction in its bearingsas the load. The turbine’s time response to Dirac load inputs and its no-load responses tocompressed air input over a range of pressures are measured. This technique, called dynamicdynamometry, requires only an inexpensive optical tachometer, a digital

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Xiang-Fa Wu

skills of utilizing all the mechanical engineering principles todesign and manufacture new mechanisms and mechanical systems. Thus, the quality andbroadness of mechanical design courses directly influences the ME education and students’career development. 44 The ME Department at North Dakota State University (NDSU) offers four required coremechanical design courses at the junior and senior levels, i.e., two introductory machine designcourses (ME 442/443 Machine Design I & II), followed by two design project courses (ME461/462 Design Project I & II). The ME 442/443 courses are instructed by conventionallecturing along with one or two semester course projects, through which students learn

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Nischal Adhikari; Sima Noghanian

project utility, the desired output varies. This tab allows the users to select theavailable output options in the WI. They are shown in Fig. 5. 2531.1.10 OutputWith this tab the user can access a hierarchical tree view of all currently available output andgraphs. The output data is organized by the study area.1.1.11 Output FiltersThis tab displays a list of active and inactive output filters associated with the project. Outputfilters can be used to compute the results using only the rays which have interacted with thefeatures in specified ways. Fig. 5. Requested output window showing that the “Propagation paths” is selected1.2 Project Hierarchy WindowAs shown in Fig. 6, the

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bob Fourney; Jason Sternhagen; George Hamer; Cory Mettler

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0038 Implementing a Freshman Experience in Electrical Engineering Bob Fourney (Robert.Fourney@ieee.org) Jason Sternhagen (Jason.Sternhagen@sdstate.edu) George Hamer (George.Hamer@sdstate.edu) Cory Mettler (Cory.Mettler@sdstate.edu) All Authors are affiliated with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at South Dakota State University (SDSU)Abstract:This paper discusses the authors’ experiences with a newly implemented freshman experiencesequence in the EECS department at SDSU

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Adam Kramschuster; Gregory Slupe

left out (e.g., quality, sample technicians, etc…). However, this provides a basicoverview of the process involved in bringing a plastic product to market and serves as rationalefor the idea behind the class project. 449In this class project, it was proposed that eight student groups from both PLE-310: InjectionMolding Theory, Design, and Application (plastics engineering students only), and MFGE-325:Computer Aided Manufacturing (both plastics engineering and manufacturing engineeringstudents), would function in the roles described in Table 1 to manufacture a plastic product. Thetiming of each class in the program sequence, along with prerequisites, is shown in Table 2.Table 3 lists the tasks

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

David E. Fly; Muhammed Buğra Açan

down following atool-path defined by the computer model until that layer is complete, then the part is loweredone thread diameter and the next layer is built atop the first. Layer by layer, as fine as 0.125mm (0.005") thick, a composite structure of plastic is created to become any 3D shape that canbe modeled on a computer.The initial purpose of 3D printing was for visual prototypes before mass production, butrecently it is being used as a production technique for complex shaped products2. Production ofcomplex parts with 3D printing is without any temporary or permanent molds. Thissignificantly reduces cost and lead times, relative to traditional plastic part productiontechniques such as injection molding. This is especially important for low