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2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Victor S. Frost

bring the material alive through the use of student driven interactive graphics and dynamicperformance metric calculations. In-line interactive questions are included to provide thestudents with rapid feedback regarding their understanding of the material. The ebook was usedas the required text in EECS 562 Introduction to Communication Systems at the University ofKansas in the Spring of 2021.KeywordsCommunication systems, electronic textbook, faculty paper.IntroductionIt is common for electrical engineering curriculum to include an introduction to communicationsystems course, either required or as an elective. There are many books in the market to teach anintroduction to communication systems course, e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8

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2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Dominique Savage; Trent Porterfield; W. Roy Penney; Edgar C. Clausen

combined Bernoulli balance andmass balance, again with minimal deviations between the experimental and model data. Theexperiment meets all requirements for a well-designed lab experiment.Keywordslaboratory, fluid mechanics, experimentation, modeling, tank drainingIntroductionLaboratory is an essential part of the undergraduate engineering experience. The undergraduatelaboratory is extensively used in engineering curricula to expose students to engineeringequipment, allow students to work with their hands, demonstrate principles and correlations thatwere previously presented in the classroom, develop teamwork and leadership skills and serve asa vehicle for strengthening oral and written communication skills. Feisel and Rosa [1] present ahistory of

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Randy Kelley; Brandon Dooley

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Thomas W. Smith; Natacha Souto-Melgar; Edgar C. Clausen

COVID-19 [1]. By March11, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic and, by March 13,President Trump had declared COVID-19 a National Emergency [1]. At the University ofArkansas (U of A), faculty training sessions on the use of Blackboard and Collaborate wereoffered on March 11 and 12 because the faculty were told that they might need to move to fullyremote teaching at some point. Within hours, the Dean of Engineering declared that all facultyneeded to be able to teach at least one class remotely by March 19 in preparation for fully remotedelivery on a regular basis by March 30. The clear message to the faculty was to “go fullyremote and do the best you can to finish out the semester.”The following summer demonstrated that

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Charles Baukal

equipment for the lab is very inexpensive and thelab can easily be adapted to different length classes and different numbers of students.KeywordsExperiment, accuracy, precision, uncertaintyIntroductionStudents often believe that accuracy and precision mean the same thing. They also often assumethere is no uncertainty in any properties because their textbooks give a single value for eachproperty. All solved problems have a single solution. These imply there is no uncertainty in eitherproperty values or solutions, which is clearly not the case in actual practice.Morris and Langari [1] define (p. 17) the accuracy of an instrument as “a measure of how closethe output reading of the instrument is to the correct value.” They define (p. 17) inaccuracy

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2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Robert C. Knox; Robert W. Nairn

environmental faculty in the CEES at OU includes both environmental engineers andenvironmental scientists. CEES benefits from the synergy of engineers working with non-engineers in both the research and teaching missions of the school. In the early 1990’s, CEES © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021 2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conferencedecided to coordinate “capstone courses” (a.k.a., senior design) with practicing professionalsoutside of the university. The use of real world, multidisciplinary, practitioner directed capstoneprojects provided many benefits over the traditional single student “senior design” papers([1],[2]). In the mid 2000’s, CEES made the decision to implement a two

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Kam Yuen Cheng; Rebecca Yang

aspirations onto the decision-making table more and more.The current construction engineering education in New Zealand cultivate students who acquireknowledge, skills and attitudes that resonate and reinforce New Zealand’s global competitiveadvantage are better equipped to operate effectively in an increasingly bi-cultural New Zealandand an enduring multi-cultural global market.The previous studies have shown that women in construction industry were facing manychallenges such as long working hours, glass ceiling to board level[1]. Many of the problems thatwomen face in the construction industry are caused by gender inequality, either directly orindirectly. Women are underrepresented and undervalued in this industry although they can bringto an

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Mostafa Elsaadany; Timothy J. Muldoon; Raj R. Rao

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference Instructional and learning opportunities for remote offerings of integrated lab-lecture core undergraduate biomedical engineering courses Mostafa Elsaadany1*, Timothy J. Muldoon1, Raj R. Rao1 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA *Corresponding authorAbstractEmergency remote teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had many challenges and amyriad of lessons learned, requiring critical self-assessment on the teaching process during theunplanned shift to remote instruction and to

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Ann Gansemer-Topf; Shan Jiang; Nigel Reuel; Gul Okudan-Kremer; Qing Li; Rebecca Mort; Dong Chen

from the National Science Foundation, Iowa State University (ISU)developed the Graduates for Advancing Professional Skills (GAPS) program(https://gaps.iastate.edu/). The program aims to address the question: How can projectmanagement (PM) skill training be integrated with thesis research in graduate education? Toaddress this question, we sought to establish the GAPS learning community. Based on literatureof communities of practice [1] - [4], our intent was to develop a community of practice that © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021 2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conferenceconsisted of an academic course and co-curricular community building and networking activities.Due to COVID

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Rachel Mosier P.E.; Sanjeev Adhikari; Sandeep Langar

beginning of Covid-19. The most recent occurrences arepresented at the top of the graph. The graph lists recession events only and names associated with thoseeconomic events, which sometimes include the wars that preceded them. Not all recessions are shown,especially as this research is only interested in the United States. Further, some economic downturns wereless than a year and are not included, like the brief recession from 1969-70 (NBER 2020). See figure 1. Inthe United States, since 1979, there has been a focus on limiting economic events through the FederalReserve and adjusting interest rates (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco 2003), which partiallyexplains the reduced length of recessions after the Great Depression.After the Great

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2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Amy Reynolds Warren; Kaitlyn Harp; Narmine Ben Aissa; Eric Specking

students.KeywordsSummer camps; Assessment; In-person to virtual; Underrepresented; URMIntroductionAs new technologies emerged over the last several decades, the need for a STEM workforceincreased and began a movement in the United States (US) to improve STEM education. Worldeducation rankings show the US lagging behind other nations in developing STEM skills [1]. Inorder to help overcome this widening gap, the US began a push for STEM opportunities for K-12students outside of schools, especially for reach underrepresented minority (URM) students whomay not have equal access to STEM opportunities. In 2007, the University of Arkansas Collegeof Engineering (UACOE) began offering summer programs to increase STEM exposure. In thesecamps, students are free to develop

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Kabilananthan Asokan; Nur-E-Afra Anika; Bryar Pim

” “Automation”Introduction:Irrigation is known as artificially applying water during specific times. It can also be consideredas removing water from the field by artificial means. Crops need favorable conditions to grow,and these conditions include soil moisture, temperature and light intensity. In recent years, one ofthe crucial challenges that the world is facing is food scarcity. With demand for food increasingdue to rapidly rising population and supply not being enough, food prices have been constantlyincreasing. Lester Brown, an environmental analyst said in an interview to The Guardian thatfood is the new oil and land is the new gold. Figure 1 The chart shows the countries facing acute food scarcity in 2020

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Michael A. Rother

include using Arduinos in a heat exchangerexperiment, using more synchronous contact to improve communication, and implementing achemical reaction lab with glowsticks or other materials.KeywordsOnline, Laboratory, At-home Experiments, Faculty PaperIntroductionTo accommodate the teaching changes necessitated by the global pandemic, a variety ofapproaches have been taken to laboratory instruction, particularly for the upper division unitoperations course in chemical engineering. For example, one method is the ‘lab-in-a-box’technique [1], [2], in which the required materials to conduct an experiment are sent out to thestudents. This approach allows for a high level of sophisticated equipment, such as 3D printers[2]; however, it requires that

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Sumit Verma; Zahra Mansouri; R. Panneer Selvam

. Besides the information provided in this paper, authors have also shared anextended report based on current work and the relevant case files via Github repository(https://github.com/rpsuark/ASEE21-OpenFOAM-Introduction) for a hands on learningexperience. With the help of information contained in this paper along with the extended reportand uploaded case files, readers can install the open-source software packages - ‘OpenFOAM’ and‘ParaView’, make their own simple case files, run simulations, and visualize the simulated results.KeywordsComputational Fluid Dynamics, Building Aerodynamics, OpenFOAM, ParaView.1. Introduction1.1 Need for Open Source CFD Program for Class InstructionWhen teaching engineering courses such as Computational Fluid Dynamics

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2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Zahra Mansouri; Sumit Verma; R. Panneer Selvam

provided at https://github.com/rpsuark/ASEE21-OpenFOAM-LES.KeywordsComputational Fluid Dynamics, OpenFOAM, Large Eddy Simulation, Wall Function,Logarithmic Velocity Profile.1. Introduction1.1. Suggested Course Module in CFD for Industrial Application PurposesComputational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind engineering are some of the most importantcourses taught in universities which provide exposure to the students about the potentiallycatastrophic damages that can be brought by severe winds. These courses are basically driven withthe motive to train and educate students to compute the wind velocities and pressures on buildingso that with a better estimate of wind loads, the structures and buildings could be designed better.At the University of

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Emmanuel U. Enemuoh

better prepare graduates for engineering practice.KeywordsSubject Matter Experts, Engineering Design, Engineering Capstone, Faculty Paper, UniversityDesign Challenge © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021 2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference 1. Introduction Engineering education continues to emphasize teaching engineering design at the senior levelwith industry-oriented projects. Engineering design is defined by Accreditation Board forEngineering and Technology (ABET) as “the process of designing a system, component, orprocess to meet desired needs. It is a decision making process (often iterative), in which the basicscience and mathematics and engineering sciences are

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Virginia R. Charter

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference Student Learning Index and Student Performance in Engineering Statics Virginia R. Charter, PhD, PE Oklahoma State UniversityAbstract Within higher education, there is an expectation from the various stakeholders thatlearning will occur. How learning occurs can differ from student to student. Felder andSilverman [1] knew this when creating the Index of Learning Styles. Students must receive andprocess information in order to learn, but how they do so may impact their performance in class.This study examines how much the Index of Learning Styles can explain their

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Todd Easton

sections to online. As aresult, most spring semesters had a week less of learning outcomes. Many students struggled anda variety of institutions provided allowances that enabled students to earn a passing grade thatwould not impact the students’ GPAs or their graduation status (increase the number of hourstaken in nongraded courses). Student learning outcomes from the Spring 2020 semester are notthe focus of this paper. For the Fall 2020 semester, Kansas State University allowed faculty to teach in person oronline. The students in person had to sit 6 feet apart to avoid contact tracing due to classattendance. The author opened up a section of in person for an Operations Research 1 course.This course is a junior level course and required for all

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Laura P. Ford

the end of the class and graded primarilyon participation. The on-line students rarely asked questions and did not turn their cameras on. Idid not get to know the on-line students or their abilities and would not be able to write arecommendation letter for any of them. Student-faculty interaction has a significant effect onstudent self-efficacy (which affects GPA and retention) [1], so I intentionally increased requiredstudent-faculty interaction in my Spring 2021 lecture course.In my separations/mass transfer course, I had stopped requiring homework due to concerns aboutstudents copying solution keys. For Spring 2021, I wanted to include some homework forpractice. To increase student-faculty interaction, I required that the homework be

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Yifan Zhou; Yanwei Sun; Zachary Ball; Zhenjun Ming; Janet K. Allen; Farrokh Mistree

Laboratory, University of Oklahoma, USA/Systems Realization Laboratory, University of Oklahoma, USAKeywordsEngineering Design, Design Education, Learning Statements, Self-Tutoring System, studentpaperExtended AbstractHow can students leverage the historical learning reflection data collected from former studentsin design, build, and test courses to tutor themselves in their own learning through reflection ondoing?University of Oklahoma (OU) offers a course named AME4163: Principles of EngineeringDesign. In the course, students learn by reflecting on doing in an immersive authenticenvironment[1]. After taking the course, the students need to write learning statements. Alearning statement is a

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Karl D. Schubert; Leslie B. Massey; Carol S. Gattis

studentswith an introduction to innovation, develop and nurture the students’ innovation mindset and skills,and also help the students’ successful transition to college.The first-year two-week intercession course was designed and developed with two credit hoursfocusing on content related to innovation and one credit hour focusing on student success topics.The significant academic course components included: 1) interactive active-learning modulesrelated to innovation processes, identifying where good ideas come from, working in teams,leadership, project management, and communication and presentation skills; 2) team innovationprojects, one topic-assigned, applying skills learned in the content modules to develop innovationand team collaboration skills

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Kevin Hall

– asa dynamic, ever-evolving field. Indeed, in its 1955 Report on Evaluation of EngineeringEducation (known as the “Grinter Report”)1, a panel sponsored by the American Society forEngineering Education (ASEE) stated: “Engineering is far from static, for it is essentially a creative profession.”This sentiment is echoed in the Summary Report of the 1995 Civil Engineering EducationConference2: “…civil engineering education should be continually evolving to higher levels of quality and at all times incorporating new technologies and practices into the civil engineering education process.”In keeping with these statements, the engineering profession has witnessed an acceleration of thebreadth, depth, and magnitude of change

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Leslie B. Massey; Aysa L. Galbraith

-LearningIntroductionRetention of students is an important factor in higher education, especially for first-year students.Many colleges have implemented and are continuously evolving first-year programs to aid inretention. The components of these programs vary by institution but range from introductorydesign courses, block schedules, learning communities and/or and other specialized programsincluding summer bridge programs [1]-[5]. While these programs have been shown to bebeneficial to students and increase retention, we question that if retention efforts of first yearprograms cannot be one size fits all, which population of students should efforts be focusedtoward with limited resources.The First-Year Engineering Program (FEP) at the University of Arkansas was

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Edward Carl Greco; Matthew Garett Young

retention.KeywordsStudent success, retention, gateway course, faculty paperIntroductionPredicting student success based on their performance in certain fundamental courses withintheir first three semesters facilitated intervention to enhance retention. Electric circuits has beenidentified as a key gateway course which was highly predictive of students’ success in theirprogram [1]. These gateway courses occurred early in the curriculum allowing actions to betaken to assist students to complete their program. The electric circuits courses provided thebasic prerequisite knowledge required in several electrical engineering upper-level courses fromelectronics to controls. Electric circuits I, the first of the two-course sequence, introduces thebasic concepts and

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Helen Douglass; Peter LoPresti

communities. Students represented avariety of social and cultural backgrounds. Of the 10 teachers in the RET program, all © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021 2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conferenceparticipants were from public institutions and represented a variety of experience levels, socialand cultural backgrounds. Preliminary data suggests that the two days that students worked withRET teachers on four centers that included programming, flying drones and 3D printing, theirresponses for considering engineering in their future and people like them could be engineerswere the highest of the week. Excerpts of data are included in Fig 1.Fig 1. Student responses to engineering identity

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Rossana Villa-Rojas; Mei Lu

institution faced additional challenges such as different time zones andinaccessibility to digital tools or sites due to internet censorship and unreliable internetconnections. This extended abstract describes lessons learned from teaching lectures andlaboratories, both synchronously and asynchronously, for English as a Second Language (ESL)students residing in China and enrolled in the internationally cooperative dual degree 3+1 FoodScience Program established between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and NorthwestA&F University (NWAFU, China) during the COVID-19 pandemic.Instructor engagement with student in and outside the classroom is crucial for student success,satisfaction and retention [1]. These interactions are challenging when

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Abner Peralta; Natacha Souto-Melgar

demonstration. This video demonstration could also be useful in other chemicalengineering courses. Also, during summer 2021, we expanded this project to study therepeatability of the experiment. We performed multiple experimental runs at differentconcentrations of sodium chloride (1 M and 2 M).The equipment that we used is the Armfield’s liquid diffusion apparatus. It consists of a diffusioncell, a diffusion vessel, a magnetic stirrer, and a conductivity meter. The diffusion cell consists ofa honeycomb of accurately dimensioned cylindrical pores that allows the diffusion of the saltinto the diffusion vessel. The diffusion was studied by measuring the change in conductivity ofthe pure water in the diffusion vessel as the salt solution diffuses into the

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Manuel D. Rossetti; Bryan Hill; Ronna Turner; Wen-Juo Lo; Ed Pohl; Xintao Wu

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference Introducing the Multi-Disciplinary Data Science (MDaS) S-STEM Scholarship Program Manuel D. Rossetti, Bryan Hill, Ronna Turner, Wen-Juo Lo, Ed Pohl, Xintao Wu University of ArkansasAbstractThe Multi-Disciplinary Data Science (MDaS) program assists with filling the growing demandfor multi-disciplinary STEM base data science skills by supporting underrepresented minoritystudents with scholarships and professional development activities. The goals of the MDaSprogram are 1) to establish recruitment and retention programs for the new data science majorsand

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Christi Patton Luks

smallgatherings of socially distanced students, lab courses at Missouri S&T were allowed to be inperson with very small groups. These caps did not accommodate all students in many cases.Thus, other approaches were required. For the Fall, the faculty tried a tight schedule of teamsboth inside and outside of the designated lab time. Social distancing guidelines were maintained,but the faculty and TAs were overworked. Late that semester, the instructor for the ChemicalEngineering Unit Operations (UO) Lab 1 announced that he would be leaving.The responsibility for taking over the lab was handed over to the author. I had taught the UO laba few times at another university, so I was not a complete novice. The equipment at my current

Collection

2021 ASEE Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Justin M. Hutchison; Edward Peltier

Chemical and PetroleumEngineering (CPE) and incoming EE graduate students.The EE curriculum focuses on first-principle conceptswith correspondingly named courses of Concepts ofEnvironmental Chemistry (CE770), Physical Principles(CE772), and Biological Principles (CE773). At the start Figure 1: Alignment of the core EEof the 2020 academic year, Professors Hutchison and curriculum that incorporated skills.Peltier initiated a course transformation to align coursecontent and increase skill-based curriculum, specifically in writing, modeling, data interpretation,and experimentation (Figure 1). This included a significant expansion of our one-creditEnvironmental Engineering Laboratory (CE771) into a three-credit course.As these classes represent core