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2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Mudasser Wyne; Alireza Farahani

departmentchair and school Dean. The PAR is next submitted for approval to the Undergraduate Councilthat has its own Assessment Committee that review PARs and add comments and assign a score(Initial, Emerging, Developed or Highly Developed) based on the rubric provided for eachsection in the PAR. The chair of the committee then presents their findings to the UndergraduateCouncil and seeks Councils approval. Figure 1 show the cycle each program PAR is routedthrough. Proceedings of the 2014 American Society for Engineering Education Zone IV Conference Copyright © 2014, American Society for Engineering Education 460

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2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Nancy Warter-Perez; Sevak Ghazaryan; Jerardo Martin

Successful K-12 STEM Education identified three goals for U.S. STEMeducation4”: • Goal 1: Expand the number of students who ultimately pursue advanced degrees and careers in STEM fields and broaden the participation of women and minorities in those fields. Proceedings of the 2014 American Society for Engineering Education Zone IV Conference Copyright © 2014, American Society for Engineering Education 444 • Goal 2: Expand the STEM-capable workforce and broaden the participation of women and minorities in that workforce. • Goal 3: Increase STEM literacy for all students, including those who

Collection

2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Hen-Geul Yeh; Duc Tran; Paula Quintana

a broad scope of thestrategies, procedures, and techniques required to properly integrate the various aspects ofemerging green energy technologies. Through the experiences of two graduate students whohave attended the conference, this paper describes their study, along with observations madebefore, during and after the conference, and how the conference have influenced their researchand career choices.TestimoniesElectrical Engineering Graduate Student #1, Emphasis: CommunicationsMultidisciplinary project-based learning in the classroom. I got the invitation to participate inthe IGESC 2013 during the first lecture of the class Advanced Digital Signal Processing(EE585).The professor of the class motivated us to be a part of this conference

Collection

2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Ding Yuan; Nebojsa Jaksic; Jude DePalma

Table 1. The gradingpolicy also remained the same as before, whether the group used the EV3 or the NXT.Table 1. Tasks assigned in mini-lab. Task No. Requirement I - Required The robot is to operate as follows: 1. After placing robot at the START position the robot should be turned on. 2. Then, robot should travel forward two feet (2‟). 3. After that, robot should beep. 4. Then, robot should travel back and return to its starting position. 5. When done, robot should play a tune (your choice) indicating the program is finished. II - Required Change the program from Task I so the robot travels

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2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Manoochehr Zoghi; Hernan Maldonado; Syreeta Martinez

academically at-risk, peer mentoring programs, professional speaker series, field trips,tutoring services, professional development workshops, and numerous other opportunities thatwill be elaborated herein.IntroductionIn a recent report, published by the National Science Board, entitled: “Moving Forward toImprove Engineering Education,” it is accentuated that rapid changes are taking place forengineering on a global scale, which require Federal leadership to respond quickly andinformatively.1 Following an extensive deliberation via a series of workshops, the Boardidentified three key challenges in engineering education: (1) responding to the changing globalcontext of engineering, (2) changing the public perceptions of engineering, and (3) retention

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2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Shervin Zoghi; Eric Liguori; Manoochehr Zoghi; Fariborz Tehrani; The Nguyen

of the modern technological society.IntroductionEvidently, the globalizations of the economy, Internet connectivity, and exploding informationtechnology have had a profound impact on modern societies.1, 2 The modern society, and oureveryday lives, are increasingly dependent on scientific and technical innovation.3 Engineering,central to innovation, is dramatically influenced by the rapid changes that are taking place on aglobal scale. There has been much debate in recent years that traditional engineering education,however, does not adequately prepare the new graduates to face the ever-changing demands oftechnological societies. In a survey of engineering employers, conducted by Todd et al.4, thefollowing frequently-cited perceptions of

Collection

2014 ASEE Zone 4 Conference

Authors

Bhaskar Sinha; Pradip Dey; Gordon Romney; Mohammad Amin; Debra Bowen

, and enhance their understanding of racial, economic, andsocial differences and similarities in society14.This paper is an analysis of two capstone projects for the BS-ITM academic program: CoxYMCA (three students in the project group) and EazyToyz (four students in the project group). Itdetermines how the projects fulfill the BS-ITM Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) and provideuseful service to the community – especially, to the low-budget and non-profit organizations thathave limited financial resources.Capstone Project 1: Cox Tech Center Upgrade at YMCA Youth & Family Services15This project for a non-profit organization consists of upgrades and modifications to the Cox TechCenter lab at the YMCA of San Diego County – Youth & Family

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Jing Pang

in the projects assignedwhich were designed according to the course learning outcomes. They were evaluated afterstudent designs were collected and positive results were identified in this work.1. IntroductionCritical thinking requires the ability to analyze and evaluate information4, 5, 6. A lot of researchershave recognized the importance of critical thinking in education. How to organize active learningenvironment to enhance critical thinking among students has been one challenging and alsopassionate topic for many educators. In the field of health science, case studies were used topromote critical thinking. Life experience case examples or simulated real patient situation caseswere used by nurse educators to help students acquire critical

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bryan K. Allen; Gordon W. Romney

1 Agile Capstone Integration of Free, Disparate Cloud Services Produced a Prototype Application that Tracks Airborne Wildfire Firefighting Resources Bryan K. Allen and Gordon W. Romney School of Engineering and Computing National University, San Diego, CAAbstractA prototype application designed to leverage state-of-the art cloud computing technologies wasdeveloped as a capstone project for U.S. Defense Support to a Civilian Authority mission. Theoutcome of this paper demonstrates the Agile development and

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Kevin R. Anderson; Clifford M. Stover

these type of endeavors involve the students, theengineering companies, the local community, as well as the faculty. Assessment tools andgrading rubrics used to quantify the student experiential learning are also discussed.IntroductionThe use of engineering capstone projects for undergraduate engineering education is commonin the literature. The study of Gannod et al.1 presents the concept that a capstone course ismeant to provide graduating seniors with a culminating experience that ties together theknowledge and skills that have been attained over the duration of a four-year curriculum. Inthe study of Conn and Sharpe2, the authors describe a year-long senior mechanical engineeringdesign course that is run in cooperation with industry

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2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Pradip Peter Dey; Gordon W. Romney; Amir Rezaei; Amelito G. Enriquez; Bhaskar Raj Sinha; Mohammad Amin

conformity and standards. With the recent advances inautomation and social changes, questions are raised about the current adequacy of theseparadigms. In the coming decades, growth of diversity of talents would be more appropriatethan conformity of skills measured primarily by multiple choice tests, because creative problemsolvers increasingly are in demand. Some of the legendary engineers, such as Steve Jobs andBill Gates were college dropouts. There are several emerging alternatives that involve distancelearning that need to be considered in order to investigate the real issues in engineering andscience education. Some of the pertinent questions about any engineering program are: (1) Howwell do the program learning outcomes, teaching practices

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Tania Martinez; Amado Flores-Renteria; Jasmine Flores; Jolani Chun; Cheng Chen; Hezareigh Ryan; Wenshen Pong; Nilgun Ozer; Hamid Shahnasser; Hamid Mahmoodi; Amelito G. Enriquez; Albert Cheng; Kwok-Siong Teh; Xiaorong Zhang

and theirdecision to pursue a civil engineering profession.1. IntroductionRecent earthquakes in California and Japan have caused significant impact on human society (20killed, $20B in direct losses during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and 5500 killed, $147B indirect losses during the 1995 Kobe earthquake). Similar earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greatercan have a more profound impact on the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Future earthquakedisaster prevention and preparation require that young professional civil engineers be trained andrecruited into the next generation workforce as part of the efforts to mitigate seismic hazard andimprove public safety.Community colleges serve as the gateway to higher education for large numbers of

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Thomas M. Korman

to use in their assessment of the appropriate mark-up: 1. The company’s office overhead is approximately 2.5% of the project volume in dollars. Proceedings of the 2015 American Society for Engineering Education/Pacific Southwest Conference Copyright © 2015, American Society for Engineering Education 65 2. The company really needs the work right now, but there are three other bidding opportunities that look promising in the next three weeks. 3. The project duration is 24 months, and their firm likes to bring in approximately $10,000/month revenue on the proposed project manager and

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bridget Benson; John Oliver

provide enrichment activities tothose students who mastered the unit’s learning goals while providing corrective activities tostudents who did not achieve mastery of the material. After performing corrective activities,students can then take another formative assessment that covers the same concepts and skills asthe first, but includes slightly different problems or questions. This second assessment verifieswhether or not the corrective activities helped students overcome their learning difficulties andoffers students a second chance at showing mastery of the learning goals5. Figure 1 illustratesthis instructional sequence. Figure 1: Bloom's Mastery Learning Instructional Sequence5Although mastery learning schemes have

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Thais da C. L. Alves

to promote student engagement withstudent chapters. The activities developed by the NECA student chapter at San Diego StateUniversity are used as a baseline for the discussion.Student chapters, industry support, and professional engagementThe Grand Challenges for Engineering defined by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE2012)1 include items such as make solar energy economical, restore and improve urbaninfrastructure, and advance personal learning. In this context, the work of NECA studentchapters and their participation in the Green Energy Challenge (GEC)2, the major competitionthese chapters are encouraged to participate in, provide students with an opportunity to addressissues related to the three challenges identified above

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bhaskar R. Sinha; Pradip P. Dey; Gordon W. Romney; Mohammad N. Amin; Debra A. Bowen

students who work with the instructor andsupervisors who are faculty members. In most instances the instructor and the supervisor are thesame. Also, as a project is defined there will be an end-user client who has agreed to sponsor theproject and actively participate in the development life-cycle. At the end of the three-monthduration, a working prototype is presented to a panel and the sponsor, and a formal report isdelivered.During these three months, the team meets with the instructor twice a week and with the end-user client as required in an agile development environment that consists of five phases:1. Proposal: The team makes a short informal presentation of the needs of a prospective client and proposed project in the first week. Other

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Jim Helbling; Angela Beck

faculty members deliver the content of a single course, sharing the burden ofcourse preparation, lecture, in-class tasks, and assessment 1, 2. One purpose of team-teaching isto supplement gaps in student education (typically gaps in math or communication or ethics or Proceedings of the 2015 American Society for Engineering Education Pacific Southwest Conference Copyright © 2015, American Society for Engineering Education 134leadership skills); this supplementation is accomplished not by tutoring or by external labs but byintegrating the supplemental instruction directly into a specific course content. By

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

David F. Hosterman; Wblesther Gama; Andrew Vitaljic; Jonathan H. Poluan; Ali A. Ballout; Yong X Gan; James L. Smith; Jimmie C. Oxley

. Meanwhile, structuring positive interdependence of students is emphasized. Themain content includes: (1) low cost, scalable manufacturing process leading to variousnanomaterials research, (2) nanomaterials property characterization, and (3) cooperative learningeffectiveness evaluation. The paper addresses fundamental issues including how to allowundergraduate students learning better through cooperative learning approach, how to effectivelydevelop workforce in several priority fields in this country such as advanced manufacturing andnanotechnology, and how to end social inequality in engineering education and practice. Theresearch work focuses on low cost, scalable nanomanufacturing. Nanoporous materials,electrospun nanofibers, and nanoparticles

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Rita Melgar; Anthony Nash; Mou Sun; Carmen Tepeu Yoc; Maral Amir; Cheng Chen; Amelito G. Enriquez; Hao Jiang; Hamid Mahmoodi; Wenshen Pong; Hamid Shanasser; Kwok-Siong Teh; Xiaorong Zhang

light. Other cells within the eye are responsible to carrythese stimuli to Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGC). At this stage “retinal ganglion cells respond tocontrast in their receptive field. On-center ganglion cells are excited when stimulated by light inthe center and inhibited when stimulated in the surround; off-center cells have the oppositeresponses”4. Up to this point all the cells involved in object and orientation recognition arelocated in the eye, while the next stage is the transmission of the stimulus to the brain.Simple and Complex Cells are found in the primary visual cortex located in the occipital lobe ofthe brain (refer to Figure 1). Simple Cells are sensitive to edges with specific orientations. Whena simple cell is fired the

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Martin Koch

context of a one unit lab.The knowledge, time and money that had to be expensed inhibited prototyping. Well, about thistime the Rapid Prototyping (RP) industry was just beginning. Cool Stuff and we got heavilyinvolved with it from the beginning (reference 1). We could imagine the possibilities for theproduction of tooling and in the teaching of engineering design. We acquired our first systems in1993 and started to use them in the course. However, there were problems with ourinfrastructure for the course. We couldn’t yet support the rapid development of geometries in thetimeframe we had. We were constrained by the lack of a computer lab or adequate software.Also, we lost the existing foundry lab when we joined the Manufacturing department to

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Devin D. Cook

159 PRINT "Hello, world!" Figure 1: Hello World in QuickBasicUnfortunately, the original procedural paradigm is being supplanted by the object-orientedparadigm. Under object oriented programming, everything is an object and all written code isrelated to class definitions and methods. While this approach offers flexibility and scalability, itrequires students to define class constructs before even basic programming concepts areunderstood – such as expressions, variables, conditional logic, loops, etc… This results in alearning curve that has increased rather than decrease.For example, the following is same Hello World example in the Java Programming Language.This code declares a

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Hasmik Gharibyan

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Bari Ma Siddique

techniques to protect internet servers and provide security toonline education from such threats.1. IntroductionFor a millennium, universities have been considered the main societal hub for knowledge andlearning. However, over the last several decades, the basic structures of how universities produceand disseminate knowledge and evaluate students have shifted in a new direction due to societalchanges created by technology—computers, internet, instant messaging, e-mail, Facebook, andtweeter. The transmission of knowledge need no longer be tethered to a college campus. Thetechnical affordances of cloud-based computing, digital textbooks, mobile connectivity, high-quality streaming video, and “just-in-time” information gathering have pushed vast

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Zekeriya Aliyazicioglu; Rajan Chandra

218 Course Supplement Tools for Enhancing Students' Learning in ECE Freshmen Courses Zekeriya Aliyazicioglu, Rajan Chandra Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CAAbstractAll freshmen students in our Electrical and Computer engineering take (1) Introductory CircuitAnalysis and (2) Introduction to C++ Programming for Engineers. These courses are the gatewaycourses to both Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. They not only provide theessential problem solving

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Ronald P. Uhlig

which amplify theNational University mission. Consistency between the BS in Computer Science PEOs anduniversity mission are demonstrated by the mapping between the PEOs and the InstitutionalLearning Outcomes (ILOs) shown in Table 1.All seven ILOs are related to BS Computer Science PEO #1. To be engaged and active in thecomputing profession requires applying information literacy skills to maintain currency.Practicing, responsible professionals also communicate daily with others in their profession andwith other professionals in their enterprises. There is a direct relationship between displayingmastery of knowledge and skills in computer science and being engaged and active in thecomputing profession or related professions. Employers demand

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Jean-Michel I. Maarek; Brittany P. Kay

was lower for theintroductory course. Student feedback revealed a higher degree of satisfaction in the junior-seniorlevel course. Both groups perceived that the flipped classroom approach promoted placing theresponsibility of learning on the students. We speculate that different levels of preparation forcollege were in part responsible for the mixed reception of the flipped classroom approach amongthe freshmen.1. Background:The flipped classroom approach inverts the traditional “teaching/lecture – learning/homework”model by presenting the course content outside of classroom ahead of the traditional lectureperiod and by replacing the lectures with active forms of learning in the classroom [1] [2].Typically, the content is delivered online

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2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

David J. Dimas; Faryar Jabbari; John Billimek

STEM classes offered in an online format. In one large studyat the community college level, the average proportion of enrollments that were online was10.2%. In this same study, enrollments in online STEM subjects average 3.5% whileenrollments in Humanities and Social Sciences was a very strong 20% (see Table 1). Proceedings of the 2015 American Society for Engineering Education Pacific Southwest Conference Copyright © 2015, American Society for Engineering Education 239 Table 1 - Enrollments in Online Courses Data from (Xu and Jaggers 2013

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Mehdi Khazaeli; Camilla Saviz

incorporated to improve the project and quality of student learning.ABET Accreditation Criteria for Engineering programs require that accredited engineeringprograms demonstrate students have “an ability to design a system, component, or process tomeet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political,ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability,” and “an ability to function onmultidisciplinary teams” 1. The integrated and collaborative learning environment provided bythe type of applied project used in this course can help prepare students to address problemsolving to meet desired needs within realistic constraints while developing their awareness ofcommunity needs.Active learning

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Lucie Alidieres-Dumonceaud; Chantal Charnet

final aims ofthe training.Because of these obstacles, the idea presented by Decamps et al. (2009)1 of the coursemanagement, which describes how each player carries out a particular role in the learningenvironment, is well-suited to this context. That is why we are committed to workingalongside the IDEFI project run by the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier and morespecifically through an initiative entitled “Publics Empêchés”, whose objective is toencourage success in first-year university students, though customized methods of teachingand learning, within a learning environment with no Internet access.A Situated Learning Approach without Internet AccessBecause of the lack of Internet access as well as other constraints within the French

Collection

2015 Pacific Southwest Section Meeting

Authors

Hasmik Gharibyan

%,and the average scores for the bottom 1/3 and 1/5 of the class are not much lower: 81.23% and80.57% respectively. However, test results show a different picture: while the class average is75.89%, the average scores for the bottom 1/3 and 1/5 of the class are 60.46% and 55.76%respectively. Note that “bottom” is in respect to students’ overall-grade for the whole course.Overall Grade CalculationThe final grade in introductory Computer Science courses in the United States is typicallyassigned based on the overall grade for the course, which is the weighted average of the scoresfor labs, projects, homework, and tests (i.e. midterm and final exams, lab tests, quizzes, etc.).The distribution of weights in the overall grade calculation varies from