Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Paul Ross; Gisela Kutzbach

expected for technical competence anddemanded for practical success. There is also an essential role for education in technicalcommunication which can provide both skills and enduring attitudes for career-longsuccess in technical leadership (Pappas and Hendricks, 2000).Wheeler and McDonald (2000) write: Four years is an insufficient time for students to achieve a high level of proficiency in all these areas. Rather, undergraduate engineering education should form the basis for a lifetime of learning.And, a little later: Writing can help achieve these goals in unique ways, and we argue that most courses should incorporate writing in some fashion.Ross and Kutzbach 2 In the

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Laura Grossenbacher

, because these students, if successful intheir academic careers, will go on to become practicing engineers who will have to writeproposals, environmental impact statements, feasibility studies, risk analyses, and whathave you. They will be making professional arguments, and they will be faced witharguments from others that they need to be able to analyze carefully. So, we practicethat in various ways – and of course, one obvious way is to ask them to read, write, andtalk about controversial issues in the sciences. So far, nothing here is either surprising or innovative – my colleagues and I havebeen doing this for years. And there is nothing new in the idea to use a debate formatto encourage first-year students to analyze those controversial

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

George A. Perdikaris

to control the speed or position of the shaft of motors in real time.The “spinning” of motors intelligently is fundamental to quality manufacturing. In the metalprocessing industry, for instance, the doors of home appliances such as refrigerators, washers, anddryers are formed out of steel, which is cut to size from large coils of metal and then pressed intoshape by large presses controlled precisely by computers. In paper, plastics, wood and otherindustries, consumer products ranging from toilet paper and baby diapers to office furniture andautomobiles are also made by controlling motors by computers.This paper presents a practical and systematic method for modeling, simulation, and real-timecontrol of an industrial motor plant by using a

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Charles McIntyre

, project schedules, quality and safety plans, etc.). The intent of the capstoneexperience is to integrate the engineering and management disciplines into a single comprehensiveeducational experience.Philosophical QuestionsA number of meetings were held to determine the exact role and function of the capstone experience.Initially, fundamental philosophical questions had to be addressed by the faculty. For example, whatshould be the overall structure of the course and how is this tied to the course objectives?, what is thebasic instructional format?, what are the purpose and function of the group and class meetings?, whatis the role of the instructional staff?, should and will the expertise of other faculty be required?, what isthe role of guest

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Keith B. Lodge

tried in the spring of 2002 with a class of 26 students dividedinto groups of 2; each group was assigned its own microcontroller and apparatus. There is no dedicatedlaboratory section associated with this class. In essence the use of a microcontroller allows topics, hitherto taught purely in the classroom(sometimes with the aid of demonstrations), to become the object of direct practical experience for thestudents. The topics include A/D conversion, sensor calibration, self regulation, on-off control,proportional (P) control and offset, proportional and integral (PI) control, the position and velocity formsof the PID algorithm, selection of the control interval and signal aliasing, step tests and tuning. I willdescribe (1) the

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

John Mirth; Michael Momot

criteria is more likely to occur in a stepwise manner than as acountrywide revolution in engineering education. The purpose of this paper is to present a viable first step whereby an engineering curriculum can build bridges betweenexisting courses to give students a more comprehensive experience with the soft issues of engineering education. Thebridges are built through the incorporation of intra-disciplinary design projects. The intra-disciplinary design projects presented in this paper involve the collaboration of two independent, upperdivision, engineering courses on a single design project. These projects are pursued to realize several results. Firstly, theprojects are designed to develop a collaborative project environment where