Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Charles McIntyre

reports” were tremendously beneficial for keeping thestudents on track. At the end of the semester there was no mad rush to get the work completed. Thestudents had time to reflect on their work, finalize the written report, and prepare for the final oralpresentations.Did we learn anything and what will we do differently next time? The students have an intense desirefor quality faculty input concerning their work. A superficial response or evaluation is taken morenegatively by the students than no response at all. We (as a faculty) have to develop tools andtechniques that allow for quality response to student work with a minimal time commitment form thefaculty. This is a classic “Catch 22" situation. It takes time to complete a comprehensive

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

John Mirth; Michael Momot

departments to modify their curriculums to focus on the “soft” or less technical issues that are oftenassociated with the engineering process. Indeed, some of these changes reflect a corporate movement towards concurrentengineering that hitherto has not been experienced in academic institutions. Unfortunately, the changes required fromcorporate culture and ABET have not resulted in sweeping alterations in curriculums. Some barriers that exist to curriculumchange include the transition between old and new curriculums, consideration of transfer students, the need for faculty toredesign or even drop long existing courses, and thinking about the curriculum in terms of course pairings as well as asequence. For these reasons, response to the new ABET

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Michael P. Hennessey; Allen C. Jaedike; Peter S. Rhode

perusal and reflection that may be of use to others teaching future CAD courses or others, such as students interested in CAD work in a BSME program. In addition, one can see the natural evolution of the course since it was first taught. The projects demonstrate the application of CAD knowledge acquired in the freshman Engineering Graphics course where SolidWorksTM has been taught recently. However, because of the wide applicability of CAD, projects from many other courses (such as Introduction to Engineering, Kinematics and Mechanism Design, Machine Design, and the Senior Design Clinic sequence) are emphasized (although not all of them are showcased) as well. Finally, because of the success of the Engineering Graphics course

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Greg Luttrell

thestudents in a short concise manner, and they were able to digest it over a two-week period,commenting on it, and thinking about the implementation issues of such a system.As no students had personal experience with Maglev trains, this discussion forced them to tryand put it into their own context. This is very similar to the process used by students whenforced to understand an unfamiliar case study. “When the case method is used, issues areintroduced via concrete experiences as generated by the case scenario. This forces moststudents to employ what Kolb calls reflective observation from many viewpoints in order todevelop conclusions and develop conjectural models of the new concept.”6 In the first batch ofdiscussion postings these students very

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Traci Kelly

realities of client needs. We also feel stronglythat having engineering-only teams for projects such as these does not reflect the actualbest-practices in industry today. Thus, Dr. Bradley and I recruit actively from business,technical communication, graphic design, journalism, political science, and other majorsto bring balance and perspective to our teams. The multiplicity of goals and tasks, combined with the mixed-major approach tothe IS teams, presented Dr. Bradley and I with quite a challenge. We needed to formulatecomplex arrangements and team structures to accommodate this myriad of needs. Weknew that we had to accomplish many tasks, including • meeting College of Engineering standards for the courses registered

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Murat Tanyel; Charles Adams

thecomputer tools available in these areas and in section IV, we have shown examples where onepackage’s aesthetic qualities surpass those of the other, rendering the one a “joy” to use. We notethat we have compared these packages (LabVIEW and MATLAB) only aesthetically. We would alsoadd with emphasis that our electrical engineers are exposed to both of these packages in thecurriculum; the preference noted in this paper reflects only a portion of the curriculum. By no meansdo we imply that all DSP courses around the country should drop using MATLAB and embrace Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education North Midwest Section Annual Conference Copyright ” 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

Collection

2002 ASEE North Midwest Section Conference

Authors

Paul Ross; Gisela Kutzbach

Office of the Dean of Engineering at the University ofWisconsin - Madison reported on a questionnaire sent to alumni asking about theirexperiences, professional careers, and education. A key question on the survey askedRoss and Kutzbach 1 In the Online Classroomalumni to identify the most important subjects they had studied in their undergraduateengineering programs. Another section asked what they thought they needed more of intheir education. In short, these questions asked alumni to reflect on their own educationas it affected their professional careers. More than 9,000 alumni responded to this survey(Perspective, 1994).In the list of subjects “which have been most useful in your career,” the top