Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Diana Schwerha; Chang Liu; Sertac Ozercan; Tripura Vadlamani; Lev Neiman

groups who communicated themost during the exercise and proceeded with the game only when everyone understood the concepts,scored the highest. This paper will discuss pedagogical issues with learning in virtual worlds, discuss theeffectiveness of the game, and suggest methods to improve learning. Future research will focus on theuse of Second Life for expanded statistics sessions and for human factors and ergonomics labs.1. IntroductionThe purpose of this study was to enhance Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) 306 with technologywith the intended goal of improving student learning during homework sessions. ISE 306 is the firstcourse in a two-course sequence in engineering probability and statistics. It is a required course for allISE

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

M. Ali Montazer

Helping Connecticut Aerospace Parts Manufacturers Become Lean M. Ali Montazer, Ph.D. University of New Haven – Tagliatela College of Engineering West Haven, Connecticut 06516 AbstractWith funding support from the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT) /National Aerospace Leadership Initiatives (NALI), a Center for Simulation Modeling andAnalysis has been established at the University of New Haven. The objectives of theCenter are (1) to bring modeling and simulation techniques and tools, through faculty andstudent teams, to the Connecticut aerospace parts manufacturers to support their efforts inimplementing Lean / Six

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Roy T.R. McGrann

processes whose form and function achieve clients’ objectivesor users’ needs while satisfying a specified set of constraints.” 1 Computer-aided engineering (CAE)software packages such as Pro/Engineer (Pro/E) 2 are among the modern engineering tools available toassist engineers to generate and evaluate their designs.In this paper, we begin in the Introduction with a description of the mechanical engineering curriculumat Binghamton University. The process that we have developed in the department for continuousimprovement (Departmental Course Review Process and ABET Accreditation) will be presented next.Following this will be a description of the CAE course and how it fits into the overall departmentalreview process.In the second section, the

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

transition from general design topics into their design teams and begin working ontheir selected capstone projects. Each team is assigned an advisor from the specific subdiscpline(aero/auto), which generally are the ME492/ME481 instructors. The current model releases the studentsfrom ME404 to begin work on LSN 18 of a 40 lesson semester, which limits the time allotted to thedesign teams and can induce a tight timeline. For example, during term 08-1 capstone design teams didnot begin working on their specific design until October 8th, 2007. The aeronautical capstone thisacademic year is the SAE Design, Build, Fly competition, which begins Apr 18, 2008. This leaves justover six months to design, fabricate, and test a remotely piloted airplane. Because

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

. Instructors wrestled with studentfrustration and the reality that good projects were tough to come by and an engineer’s“final design” could always be modified by a client.In 2000, the classroom and the capstone design components of this course began tochange. Planning and Design of Construction Projects continued to consist of two 50minute classroom sessions each week and two three hour laboratory periods per week. Toenhance student achievement of various educational outcomes and better meet the needsof the Coast Guard, the classroom portion of the course expanded its focus to coverlecture topics that can be assigned to six broad categories: 1. Planning 2. Cost Estimating 3. Scheduling 4. Engineering Economics 5. Engineering Ethics

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Richard J.H. Gash; David Fedroff

that class size be limited to 18 students. With a reinforced concrete course of 57students this year, the course consisted of 4 sections of about 14-15 students each. The course meets for40 lessons of 55 minutes each and also for 8 lab sessions lasting 2 hours each. On Lesson 1 the instructors challenged their students to design and mix their own concrete. Amajority of the students had never made concrete or had any experience with slag, fly ash or silica fume.The class began with a brief introduction to LEED and a discussion of the potential for SCMs to helpreinforced concrete structures achieve certification. The students divided into four groups (3 or 4 studentsper group) and set to work. Each group usedthe 3:2:1 heuristic for

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Abdelrahman M Rabie; Rahman Haleem

hours.The syllabus for the Arabic Lab is derived from that of the English course it shadows. To reduce theburden on students, most assignments given in the Lab are based on those given in the course. Studentsare then asked to produce the assignments in Arabic and any subsequent discussions are conducted inArabic. Lab sessions normally incorporate a presentation by one student or a group of students of thesubstance of the content taken in the previous course session. Discussions by all students follow thepresentations. Students take it in turn to produce the presentations. In preparing for them, students have tosearch deeper for translations of technical or discipline specific terms they encounter in addition to fullyunderstanding the subject. They

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Linda Ann Riley; Charles Thomas

printed on single sheets of paper, that when cut out andassembled, would create of a simple solid. After each teacher constructed his or her net, each drew thesolid in Pro-E. A screen shot of the solid is show in the figure below.Verbal feedback of the tutorial session was generally positive, although some teachers struggled with themechanics of the software as more advanced features such as rendering were introduced. Still theexercise provided an excellent connection between grade level and grade span expectations for theteachers and was completely adaptable to an individual teacher’s lesson plan.Although conceived of as an exercise for use in their classrooms, the major result of presenting thetutorials proved to be a means for establishing a

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Bahram Nassersharif

including theASEE, ANS, ASME, IEEE, ACM, AAAI, and SIAM. He has been active in professional society 8activities as technical session organizer, conference co-organizer, and reviewer. His professionalexperience also includes consulting services for industrial and government agencies. He holds a Ph.D. inNuclear Engineering and a B.S. in Mathematics both from the Oregon State University.Dr. Nassersharif has been an active participant in NSF Advance program both at New Mexico StateUniversity and at the University of Rhode Island. He is the recipient of an NSF Advance recognitionaward from New Mexico State University and currently serves on the NSF Advance Internal AdvisoryCouncil at the University of

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Arthur Heinricher; Brian Savilonis; David Spanagel; Robert Traver; Kristin Wobbe

).Project #1: Green HomesOne group of four students came to that brainstorming/recruiting session prepared to be a teamwith a relatively well-formulated project idea. This group calculated payback periods for thevarious construction and refurbishing options that are currently available to Massachusetts -6-homeowners. Their original proposal in late September had been to research and write about how“green” building standards have been developed and implemented. Gentle guidance andconsistent challenges to do serious work led to a remarkably robust and useful final product.Project #2: The Cost of Green Roofs versus Conventional RoofsThis was the first of two “green roof groups.” This group focused on four

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Rashmi Jain; Keith Sheppard; Elisabeth McGrath; Bernard Gallois

products andprocesses is increasingly recognized as necessary in design, and this is directly addressed by the systemsapproach.Systems engineers consider the needs of all stakeholders, both technical and non-technical, as well as thefull life-cycle of the system, when designing a solution. A detailed overview of the systems engineeringdesign process is shown in Fig. 1. The model shown is one known as Total Design after Pugh1. Thefigure illustrates a system life cycle starting from the left of the chart to the right. The first phase is that ofunderstanding the need that has to be fulfilled or addressed by the design under consideration. The cyclegets completed with the last phase of testing and integration and final deployment. Each phase in the

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

John Adams; Charles Kochakian

1 Inclusion of RFID in a BSEE CurriculumJohn Adams and Charles Kochakian, Merrimack College Department of ElectricalEngineeringAbstractThis paper discusses the evolution of a course in RFID which is now a required part of thecurriculum in Merrimack College’s BSEE program. In 2004 the department identified RFID as animportant emerging technology that would be timely to introduce at the undergraduate level.Initially, the department sponsored two seminar series with sessions taught by industryprofessionals, followed in 2007 with a full course in RFID. Advantages of RFID as a requiredcourse include using it to introduce

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Imin Kao

analysis are used as an assessment tool to evaluate the effectiveness ofintegrating podcast to teaching. This pedagogical tool for asynchronous teaching and learninghas recently been employed in the online engineering program in the State University of NewYork (SUNY) at Stony Brook.Index Terms – Assessment, Asynchronous learning, Online courses, Video Podcast.1. IntroductionMillennial students grow up with exposure to technology and are quite adapted to live withtechnologies, including their products and benefits. As a result, they are also pushing, andperhaps challenging, faculty to expand their technical horizons. Both students and faculty todayhave available to them many technologies that did not exist a decade ago. Such technologies canprovide

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Eileen M. Kowalski; Joe D. Manous

education, general chemistry, within an environmental engineeringeducation. Chemistry was selected as an area of investigation because of its repetitive application withinthe environmental engineering curriculum and, as such, provides a basic science topic that should bereasonably well understood by all environmental engineering undergraduates. Three successive cohortsof 12 seniors majoring in an ABET accredited environmental engineering program at the United StatesMilitary Academy were interviewed a few weeks before graduation on selected chemistry topics. Eachstudent was presented with five questions (Table 1) and asked to work the problems on a blackboard,explaining to the interviewers their thought process as they proceeded. The sessions were

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Elif Kongar; Tarek Sobh

technique that has the ability tohandle conflicting objectives in both preemptive and weighted manners. In this paper, we present apreemptive goal programming model for the School of Engineering at the University of Bridgeport. Dataand case studies are provided along with a list of objectives for the Engineering School.Keywords: School of Engineering, Enrollment, Sustainability, Quality of Education, Preemptive GoalProgramming, Multiple Criteria Optimization.1. IntroductionToday, ever-decreasing budgets and dynamic variations in the number of both faculty and student bodiesare two major challenges that most U.S. universities deal with. In addition to the effort to solve theseproblems, every higher education institution also concentrates on ensuring

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Dean Aslam; Aixia Shao

provided in [50].Expected Impact Table 1 shows the possible impact on different audiences in different settings and environments. Theefficacy of the program discussed in this paper is based on teaching at the undergraduate/graduate(formal) and K-12 (informal) levels. It may be pointed out that no formal education research wasconducted to generate the Table 1. Thus, the data provided here is qualitative and is based on theassessment of instructors, parents and other professional observers (one of the observers had a doctoratein education). Table 1 Learning level (Basic, Intermediate, Advance), underlying STEMS areas (S, T, E, M), expected impact (Low,Normal, High), learner interest (Low, Normal, High), possible audience types (Families

Collection

2008 Spring ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Peter Thomas Tkacik

activities take advantage of theirintense and competitive nature.One example is the “flow bench” lab in which teams of students strive to get the best performance fromthe porting of an internal combustion (IC) engine head. The competitive nature of the students resulted inhigher than expected scholastic output. The report had a one page minimum requirement; nevertheless,the average report exceeded 12 pages (1200% performance).A second example related to the use of a race session where the students logged race car data which waslater used for analysis. The students applied the expected analytical tools but then became more engagedas comparisons of students driving techniques were revealed, (fortunately, always with great positivespirit and