Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Achintya N. Bezbaruah; Rajani G. Pillai; Hannah Hood; Holly Erickson; Eric Dobervich; Jane Laux; Jamie Varholdt; Adam Gehlhar; Michelle Weber; Harjyoti Kalita; Talal Almeelbi; Mary Pate; Michael Quamme; Mohammad Enayet Hossain; Seydou Cisse; Amanda Grosz; Navaratnam Leelaruban

ASEE-NMWSC2013-0051 Promoting Nanotechnology among Middle School Students: Development and Implementation of Lesson Plans Achintya N. Bezbaruah*,#; Rajani G. Pillai**; Hannah Hood*; Holly Erickson***; Eric Dobervich***; Jane Laux***; Jamie Varholdt***; AdamGehlhar***; Michelle Weber***; Harjyoti Kalita*; Talal Almeelbi*; Mary Pate*; Michael Quamme*; Mohammad Enayet Hossain*; Seydou Cisse*; Amanda Grosz*; Navaratnam Leelaruban* *Nanoenvirology Research Group, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58108; **College of Business, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58102; ***West

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Dilpreet S. Bajwa; Sreekala G. Bajwa

design and manufacture high quality products at a minimum cost in a fast pacedenvironment, they are now more interested in the workforce who understands what is requiredfor the growth and profitability of the company. The present issue faced by industry andmanufacturing sector is not the number of students but well qualified and trained engineeringstudents (Deleveaux & Ruud, 1997). A few earlier studies have highlighted some of the major weakness of the engineering studentsas identified by the manufacturing industry (Hood, Sorensen, & Magleby, 1993, Trent & Todd,2012). The deficiencies include effective interpersonal and communication skills, projectplanning, time management, multi-disciplinary knowledge, teamwork, budget planning

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Cory J. Prust; Stephen M. Williams

thisdemonstration are: to give students experience at writing and executing a test plan, to proveconceptual feasibility of one major subsystem, and to provide the students with experience atconstruction in an open-ended design problem. This last objective is critical for the students priorto their committing a detailed technical design to paper in the second term.Each student composes a proposed Personal Growth Plan near the end of the term. In this plan,the student identifies one skill area they are targeting for improved performance over theremainder of the project. Skill areas include personal abilities such as performing analysis,solving problems, and designing to meet needs. They describe their present state, describe theirdesired state with

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Francis Peloubet; Eakalak Khan; G. Padmanabhan

this paper.Course Goals and Objectives The course combines all aspects of the preparation, planning, design, and pre-constructionphases of an engineering project into a single comprehensive and meaningful educationalcapstone experience that integrate engineering and management disciplines and reflect real-world engineering design practices. Students, working in small groups, use the knowledge andskills acquired throughout their undergraduate education to develop the documentation requiredfor actual engineering project design (i.e. project analysis, design calculations, drawings, 169material quantities, basic cost estimate, design schedule, and an overall work plan) and presentresults in verbal

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Charles McIntyre

work15 in an environment that mimics the actual construction management process. ¾ To integrate within the revised course the following topics: Construction Terminology and Accreditation, Ethical Dilemmas, Resume and Career Plan, Engineering and Tech Expo (visit and summary paper), Professional & Trade Organizations, and Guest Speakers.MethodologyThe basic methodology for the development and delivery of the revised CM&E 111 is presentedbelow. ¾ The author attended the ACCE2 Mid-Year Meeting held in Phoenix (February 2012) to discuss first-year construction management courses with construction management program directors at the Baccalaureate Program Chairs Meeting. Approximately forty- five (45) ACCE

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2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Wendy R. Stary; John R. Schultz

Technology students had already completed the requirement.Others students wanted to go but couldn’t justify the extra cost involved for food, transportation,and housing. Thus, only five students were actually enrolled by early October. A “Plan B” wasneeded to get the course, and exchange program, off the ground.Arrangements were made with the Packaging and Engineering Technology Program Directors toallow MFGT 341 in Darmstadt as a substitute for another course, MFGT 251 Plastics Materialsand Processes. MFGT 251 is one of a three course materials series required by both degrees.Normally MFGT 251 is a prerequisite for MFGT 341. Because non-plastics concentrationEngineering Technology and Packaging graduates who work in the plastics industry have a

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Cristinel Ababei; Anca M. Miron

. Moreover, among all engineering fields, electrical engineering has oneof the largest gender gaps. That is, the women’s representation in electrical and computerengineering fields is only 10% compared to for example 35% in chemical engineering 4 .In order to improve the situation of women in electrical and computer engineering fields,we designed and organized a summer camp for middle school girls enrolled in grades 6-8(11-13 years of age). This is part of a three year educational and outreach plan supportedby a National Science Foundation award. The first edition of this camp was held in 2012 inthe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at North Dakota StateUniversity (NDSU). In this paper, we present details about the first

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

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

semester. This study reports thesurvey data collected from the class and discusses how the data help design and develop thecourse. It makes recommendations to improve future courses when applying a similar hybridinstructional model.IntroductionEngineering education plays an essential role in preparing students to innovate advancedtechnologies in the future. New course design and development are part of the strategic plan tohelp students advance their learning goal while in school. In order to effectively deliver coursecontent covering a broad range of topics and facilitate interactive learning activities, engineeringcourses have been traditionally delivered in classroom settings until recent years when Internettechnologies have become an integral

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bakr M. Aly Ahmed; Khaled Nassar; Mike Christenson

design office, andthe other student assumes the role of a superintendent at a construction site. The teams competeagainst each other in an attempt to verbally communicate information. Specifically, the“designer” must communicate the floor plan drawing shown in the bottom of Figure 1 to the“superintendent,” relying only on telephone (i. e., verbal) communication. (Figure 2.) 390Figure 1. Digital model of building (top); floor plan of building (bottom). Not to scale.Figure 2. Architecture student teams in the process of playing the communication game: senders(left) and receivers (right).Game resultsTable 1 shows a sample of the results or the outcomes of the communicated information.Although all teams

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2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Byron Garry; Suzette Burckhard

, the discussion focused on various ways to encourage faculty to be moreinvolved in changes being made in the field of engineering education. These initiatives weresupported by the Dean of Engineering as a worthwhile thing to do, but there was no formalinitiative started. There were suggestions to do mini-conferences, bring in nationally-knownspeakers in the area, or have campus meetings to discuss teaching topics. Little action wastaken.At the annual ASEE Campus meeting in October, 2010, a committee was formed under the titleof ‘ASEE Dissemination Group’ and given a charge to develop an engineering-education basedevent, which could be a seminar, workshop, or discussion. Four committee members met tomake definite plans. The committee first

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Christopher R. Carroll

a CISC machine (Complex Instruction Set Computer) while the ATmega32 is clearly aRISC machine (Reduced Instruction Set Computer). These differences will affect how themicrocontroller course is taught when it is offered in the Fall using this new lab. Fortunately,however, the collection of input/output devices in the AVR microcontrollers mimics closelywhat is found in the S12, so that many of the existing lab exercises will be used again with onlyminor tweaking.This paper will discuss what has been done and what is planned for the updated microcontrollercourse. The course will be offered in the Fall, 2013, semester, using this new lab hardware forthe first time.BackgroundFor more than five years, the microcontroller course in the Electrical

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Devin R. Berg

instructor. Therefore, it is planned to expand its use throughout the term using a form ofshort-form journaling with regular documentation of how the students are finding the coursematerial relevant to their surroundings and the events in their lives. Additionally, it is planned toassess the effectiveness of these methods on enhancing student learning. This will be done 323 through the use of control and treatment groups as well as pre- and post-deployment of a concept inventory to allow for comparison of student concept retention between the groups. Acknowledgements

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2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Audrey LaVallie; Eakalak Khan; G. Padmanabhan

: Students are asked to do literature searches; most students state they have rarely done this previously, and they accomplish this with some supervision. As a group, students and mentors look at various sources and select articles by the relevance to the study. Student researchers quickly learn that eliminating sources is more of a problem than finding information and that website credentials are important. The mentor at the college usually outlines the proposal and assigns students to various tasks- often the students and the mentor meet as a group and plan the most efficient way to accomplish tasks and rough out a time-line of the study. Most students later state that these studies were much longer

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bob Fourney; Jason Sternhagen; George Hamer; Cory Mettler

dramatically improved and students appear to be better motivated. Thispaper discusses the motivation for the freshman experience, the design and implementation ofthe freshman experience, the increased retention numbers, the results of student surveys (afterthe freshman year and at the conclusion of the sophomore year), as well as future plans for thissequence.Background and Motivation:The Electrical Engineering (EE) program (in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science(EECS) Department) at South Dakota State University (SDSU) has been concerned about lowretention rates for several years. When interviewing qualified students who the faculty feel arecapable of succeeding in electrical engineering and who are either changing out of the major

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

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

functions.With student participation, the project team decided to provide a minimal and clean look to theinterface, avoiding unnecessary content or graphics. For example, the team decided thatsimplified graphic floor plans would best contextualize the building performance data. Suchplans are characteristic of architectural communications and are a simple but effective way todisplay information for people to recognize and understand the buildings they inhabit. Given thescope and content of the data, the team further decided that cycling display pages were required.As designed, the on-screen graphical interface currently consists of six separate pages whichcycle and update every few seconds. The first page consists of a summary of the building’senergy use

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Sousada Chidthachack; Mark A. Schulte; Forster D. Ntow; Jia-Ling Lin; Tamara J. Moore

AssessedWhy are you interested in becoming an engineer? Where do you see Warm up questionyourself in 5 years? 10 years?What kinds of things do you plan to do to accomplish these goals? Lifelong LearningTell me about a time when you had to expand your performance by Teamworkseeking out resources and help in ways that support timely, qualityperformance? Lifelong Learning MotivationHow important is it to seek out mentors to support and challenge future Lifelong Learninggrowth and development? Name a big problem in the world and discuss how engineers and Impact on Society

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Achintya N. Bezbaruah

the respective CC, IC or PD and/or set up teleconferences. TheCCs, IC, and PD keep constant touch with the teams to monitor their progress andhelp them to plan for the next step. In the month of May, an internationalteleconference is organized where all the teams present their research findings viamultimedia tools. NDSU’s Information Technology Services (ITS) works witheach team to set up the system needed for the teleconference. The preparation forthe teleconference typically starts a month prior to the actual event. NDSU’s 398Interactive Technology Consultant sends out video conference software(PolyCom) to the team and tests for connectivity and clarity. As a backup theteams set up a Skype or Google

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Luis Rodriguez; Gail Coover; Dalelia Davis; Angela Frey; George Johnson; Oumar Kaba; Andrew Pham; Kathlyn Bender

and physics. All students takethe 3 classes and they are not divided into groups to account for initial knowledge level. Rather,the 3 instructors work together to create a unified science experience revolving around acommon topic, for example: energy, to be studied from their respective points of view. Pre-assessment and post-assessment is carried out to evaluate conceptual understanding.The communication and study skills class has an emphasis on career and academic majoradvising. Pre-assessment and post-assessment are carried out by means of essays intended tomeasure writing and composition skills. During the eight weeks, students engage in independentprojects such as developing their academic plans for declared and alternative majors

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Kevin Craig

hour in the city and you are searching for a parking spot. Once you find one, you willhave a brief moment to pull up and back your car in. With automated parallel parking – noproblem! – but with horns blaring, what is your back-up plan if the automated system fails?Could you take over and park the car flawlessly? Have you ever done that? Could you even dothat now?In engineering, we are depending more and more on computer tools to model and analyze thesystems we conceive. If we do not use these tools correctly, or if the assumptions on which thesetools are based do not match our needs, or if the tools have a bug, or …, could we take over andapply basic mathematics and physics to the problem at hand, at least to gain insight, if not theexact

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Han-Way Huang; Nannan He

wereshipped. More than 95% of mobile phones, 90% of hard drive controllers, 40% digital TVs andset-top boxes, 15% microcontrollers, and 20% mobile computers are using the ARM processors.To keep up with the embedded industry change, we have updated the contents of ourmicrocontroller courses with the goal to keep up with the technology change and make ourgraduates more marketable. We have taught the ARM Cortext-M4 MCU in our secondmicrocontroller course and plan to also teach the simpler version of the ARM Cortex-M MCU inour first microcontroller course.Three major issues must be addressed in order to teach a new microcontroller. First, we need tochoose an appropriate Cortex-M4 demo board for students to perform laboratory experimentsand design

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Majura F. Selekwa

perception, the factthat the first group struggled for most of the time until after sitting in the session of the sec-ond group is an indication that this approach may be effective. Future plans include rigorousevaluation of this approach using a big sample and better statistical methods.5 Summary and ConclusionThis paper has outlined critical steps that must be followed by the instructor who teaches thesubject of microcontrollers to students who have a limited background in electrical , electronicand computer engineering. It stresses on the need for students to be taught the general inter-nal structure of microcontrollers and where to find specific programming information for anyparticular microcontroller. The paper believes that it is through

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Jon J. Smith; Sima Noghanian

generated in this leftmost column is displayed and available for modification in the centercolumn of the GUI. The center column is for development of the array components. An arraycomponent is a piece of the overall array developed on its own and then applied to the overallarray, in the rightmost column. An array component can be used to generate the overall array assoon as it is created or it can be modified through rotations and translations to achieve thedesired array orientation. A repeat function is also planned to be available, to repeat the samearray pattern multiple times (The repeat function is currently unavailable). These transformationsare applied separately to the array component until it is ready to be applied to the overall

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Majura F. Selekwa

microcontroller based mechatronic system for performing a particular task. Some of theseproject tasks included a control system for the four-storey elevator, a dispenser system for avending machine, centralized urban traffic control system, and a differentially steered two motorrobot drive.3 Student Response and Program ImprovementsProgram evaluation results by students have so far been positive. During the first year, the coursereceived an ‘A’ rating from all five students who participated; however, during the second year,when there were six students, one student was not happy with the microcontroller programmingtasks. One obvious reason that seemed to frustrate this student was the requirement to plan andwrite a fresh program for each module and each

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

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

properly nurtured, could lead to reallearning and innovation. The Holtby funds were intended to be used to provide the students suchan opportunity for exploration and growth. The funds were envisioned to provide the timeneeded by the participating faculty to develop project ideas and research plans for undergraduateand graduate students to engage in research and exploration on special topics not normallycovered in the current program courses. The intent was to inspire the students’ creativity andimagination to conduct additional research on special topics with faculty mentors, disseminatetheir findings to the broader public, and earn college credit for their efforts. It is envisioned thatresearch exposure through the Holtby funds shall also

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Roger Green

interpersonal influence over decree,putting the needs of others first, and developing commitment, motivation and a teamwork spirit.A servant-based leader works to align a group toward a common purpose and nurtures everyoneto perform as highly as possible. Servant leaders tend to be empathetic, caring, and goodlisteners. In servant leadership, the focus is less on the leader and more on the team being led.Of course, many professors also employ elements of servant leadership in their classrooms,although perhaps not always by purposeful and planned action.Servant leadership depends on developing a climate of trust and mutual respect. Without trust,achieving cooperation rather than compliance can be difficult, especially in educational settings.This

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Han-Way Huang; Nannan He

. Textbooks are also available for using the Nios IIprocessor [7, 8].We spent about four weeks on teaching Verilog programming and get students to work out a fewdesign projects using the DE1 kits. After that we taught students to start from a very simple NiosII microcontroller configuration and write assembly and C programs to control its operation. Welet students to work out a subset of the labs provided by Altera. Most students did not havedifficulty to get those lab assignments to work. Because of the need to teach Verilog, we didn’thave time to teach students to design their own peripheral functions and integrate with the Niosprocessor. We plan to find some way to achieve this in the future.ConclusionEmbedded system design using the FPGA is more

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Naima Kaabouch; Deborah L. Worley; Jeremiah Neubert; Mohammad Khavanin

of the project, goals and objectives, andassessment plan of the project. The second part focused on preparing students to be mentors.They participated in an exercise where they thought about their first years of college andexplored their own strategies for learning, including how they best retain information as well aswhat they found frustrating about studying calculus.They then reviewed characteristics that they felt were important to bring to the mentor-led studysessions: sincerity, respect, and active listening skills. We also emphasized the importance ofconfidentiality during this portion of the training. The third part of the training focused on how toactively facilitate mentor sessions. The mentors then participated in an informal role

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Nannan He; Han-Way Huang

programming language, was solely chosen for coding. In many cases, afterinitiating the course project, students quickly move to the implementation stage after a briefdesign phase, and start the C programming and debugging iterations using an IDE. Although thisapproach works for the small-scale course project, students have reported that it is very timeconsuming and inefficient. And the behavior of the created system often deviates from theoriginal design plan. Educators have recognized the need to introduce some efficient and cost-effective programming tools to students 7. The goal is to equip students with the knowledge fordeveloping complex engineering systems with a large number of constraints.Experts in the software engineering and computer

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

Xiang-Fa Wu

thefundamental knowledge of machine design process, material selection, and strength, deformationand life time analysis of machine parts (ME 442), and design of common machine parts (ME443). In contrast, the ME 461/462 courses are design project oriented, mimicking the real-worldmachine designs in industry. During the course of ME 461/462, typically 3-5 students form adesign group to conduct a specific design project under mentoring of one or two facultymembers. Therein, the ME 461 focuses on project plan, budgeting, conceptual and final designs;the follow-up ME 462 focuses on revised design and budgeting, prototype fabrication of the finaldesign that is accomplished in ME 461. At the end of each semester, each group is required topresent its design

Collection

2013 North Midwest Section Meeting

Authors

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

withreasonable effort. The authors chose to use National Instrument’s Web Publishing Tool to develop the remote access [3]. AUND computer acts as a LabVIEW server which hosts the internet functions. This interface also archives and provides ananalysis of gathered energy data in spreadsheet format. Text message notifications for select security features have beenimplemented.II. SYSTEM DETAILSA. Project Features, Timeline and Planning For this project, the group focused on the design of each circuit subsystems during Fall semester. This include initialLabVIEW setup to be able to test each circuits individually. In Spring, the focus was to integrate all of the circuits together,do final testing, building the demo board, and refine all LabVIEW code to