Collection

2011 North Midwest Section

Authors

M. S. Stachowicz; L. B. Kofoed

Problem Based Learning Principles for projects with “soft” evaluation. 1 M. S. Stachowicz, 2L. B. Kofoed Laboratory for Intelligent Systems, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, USA, The Warsaw School of Computer Science, Warsaw, Poland mstachow@d.umn.edu1 Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark, lk@create.aau.dk2IntroductionInspired by a design workshop course offered at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department(ECE) at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) [1] we could see

Collection

2011 North Midwest Section

Authors

Christa James-Byrnes; Mark Holdhusen

assessmentand testing. Upon receipt of all cars, the cars were tested by the instructor and the winnerdeclared. A portion of the final project score was based on how well each car did. The entiretesting was videotaped. The instructor edited the tape and posted a condensed version of the testwas posted on YouTube for the students to watch.The second project was the Wind Farm project. The project was to design a wind farm to meetthe electrical needs of a campus. Students were given hourly wind data for a year as well aselectricity usage data for a campus. Students analyzed the data and researched specificwindmills on the market in order to design a wind farm for campus. The deliverables for thisproject were a written progress report as well as a final

Collection

2011 North Midwest Section

Authors

R. Nelson; J. Bumblis; C. Liu; A. Turkmen; N. Zhou; D. Olson; R. Rothaupt

futuremanagement career track. Over the years, the industrial technology program evolved into the present-day Engineering Technology program, which currently has an enrollment of approximately 400students spread out over six concentration areas in electrical, facilities, mechanical design,nanotechnology, plastics, and production operations. In 1995 Stout received permission to offer theManufacturing Engineering Degree. With an enrollment of 230 students, this program is currently thelargest ABET-EAC accredited undergraduate program in manufacturing engineering in North America.Although the Engineering Technology3 (ET) and Manufacturing Engineering4 (MFGE) programs bothinclude aspects related to electrical / computer engineering (e.g., circuits

Collection

2011 North Midwest Section

Authors

Marian S. Stachowicz

on their projects. Students were exposed to teamwork, managingthe project and had the opportunity to improve their written and oral communication skills. Weshould view the fuzzy controller as an artificial decision maker that operates in a closed-loopsystem in real time. The more students understand conventional control, the more they will beable to appreciate some fine details of the operation of fuzzy control system.The future improvements to the Design Workshop course will be through addition the followingaspects: multidisciplinary teams including students from different engineering departments, forexample, from electrical, mechanical, industrial or computer science. The students also shouldaddress in the final reports the environmental