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Cross-cultural Engineering Skill Development at an International Engineering Summer Boot Camp

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Cultural Issues in Engineering: International Division Technical Session 2

Tagged Division

International

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

20

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34357

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34357

Download Count

804

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Paper Authors

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Nicholas Andres Brake Lamar University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4326-7800

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Nicholas Brake is an Associate Professor in the Civil and Environmental Department at Lamar University. His research interests include engineering education, concrete pavements, fatigue and fracture of concrete material systems, the use of reclaimed materials in concrete systems, and wireless power transmission in concrete infrastructure. Dr. Brake received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University.

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Oleksandra Sehin Texas State University

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Oleksandra Sehin has over ten years of experience in international and cross-cultural education. She has extensive international experience in studying, working, and living abroad. In addition to her broad education base (a Ph.D. in Adult, Professional, and Community Education, a Master’s degree in Public Administration, and a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English language and literature), Dr. Sehin has had a comprehensive experience in the field of International Affairs related to cross-cultural advising, empathizing, and identifying with international/exchange students, faculty and scholars.

Through several years of volunteering, internship, program specialist, education abroad respresentative and education abroad coordinator positions at the International and Education Abroad offices at Texas State, she has gained experience in international/exchange student advising and programming. Oleksandra has also assisted with program evaluation reports. Currently, Dr. Sehin is employed at Texas State University in the capacity of International Affairs (Education Abroad) Coordinator.

Prior to coming to the US, Oleksandra Sehin worked as an instructor of English and Russian to the undergraduate students in a post-secondary institution of higher education in Poland for four years, and as an emigration consultant in Ukraine for two years. She is fluent in three Slavic languages – Ukrainian, Polish and Russian.

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John Wade Partain Universidad Politecnica de Guanajuato

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Damian Valles Texas State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5684-9498

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Dr. Damian Valles is a an Assistant Professor with research focused in Computer Engineering. He received his B.S., M.S. and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Valles held a post-doc position at Montana Tech in the Computer Science department as the High Performance Computing (HPC) Application Scientist. He then worked at Wake Forest University as a HPC system administrator for the Information Systems department, and part-time lecturer for the Computer Science department. Dr. Valles has been working in architecting, researching, and system administrating HPC since 2004. His research goal is to merge Engineering and Science research to HPC, Machine Learning, Embedded Systems, and Visualization solutions to enhance simulation and discovery.

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Alberto Marquez P.E. Lamar University

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Alberto Marquez is an associate professor in the Industrial Engineering Department at Lamar University. His previous academic appointment was Department Chair of Industrial Engineering at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico City.

His research interests include modeling for decision making and optimization, with applications to supply chain, heuristic algorithm development, effective modeling and training for decision making. His publications encompass the developing of decision support systems for supply chain design; manufacturing, transportation and warehousing optimization, manufacturing capacity modeling and forecasting, simulation, scheduling, inventory policy, and process design and optimization.

He got his Ph.D in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University in 1999 with a Fulbright-Conacyt scholarship.

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Jesus Alejandro Jimenez Texas State University

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Dr. Jesus Jimenez is a Professor in the Ingram School of Engineering and the Industrial Engineering Program Coordinator at Texas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University. His research interests are in the modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems; computer simulation; statistical design of experiments; and sustainable production systems. His professional mission is to inspire others to improve systems through simulation modeling and analysis, applied operations research, and applied statistics.

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George Saltsman Lamar University

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Dr. George Saltsman is Research Associate Professor in the Center for Doctoral Studies in Educational Leadership and currently serves as the Director of Center for Educational Innovation and Digital Learning at Lamar University. Dr. Saltsman assists UNESCO as a mobile learning policy advisor and co-chair of the Information Communication Technology thematic group for UNESCO’s Teacher Task Force for Education 2030.

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Rosario Davis Texas State University

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Abstract

International cross-cultural experiences have become essential components in the education of engineering students to enhance teamwork and communication skill development across different cultural and language boundaries. To this end, a customized 12-day international summer boot camp was designed to bring together third-year students from Universidad Politécnica de Guanajuato (Mexico) and post-grad students from two United States institutions (Lamar University and Texas State University) to i) promote cross-cultural collaboration and skill development in engineering, ii) increase awareness of study abroad opportunities, iii) create a network of students and faculty experts to interact and share ideas and resources in English, and iv) increase confidence in public speaking. The camp was hosted by Texas State University. The engineering students participated in several hands-on activities, that included both non-technical skill activities in the beginning of the camp that transitioned to more technical, engineering-related activities at the end of the camp. Some of the activities included: i) contextualized grammar and vocabulary exercises, ii) contextualized team building and leadership training using Six Thinking Hats, iii) delivering technical and non-technical engineering presentations, iv) engineering design, building, and testing using CAD and 3D printing, v) design of lean assembly lines, vi) product life management, vii) discrete event simulation of an auto-part manufacturing process, and viii) using machine learning for detection of faulty automobile components. In addition to curricular camp activities, the students also participated in several fun extra-curricular activities that included a river float near campus.

Program outcomes and objectives were assessed by quantitatively capturing student cross-cultural skill development, confidence, and teamwork skills using a pre/post questionnaire. The findings suggest that having engineering students from Mexico and the United States working as one team provided a unique opportunity for students to understand the importance of enhancing communication and interpersonal skills in order to be successful in solving real-world engineering problems. Student engineering teams were able to communicate effectively and evaluate work to improve design effectiveness while solving a real-world engineering design problem. Furthermore, by working in a team with culturally diverse students, participants better understood the role that a diverse group plays in the learning process in general and in personal development in specific. Participants have increased their self-confidence and improved their interpersonal skills. They acquired a better understanding of how to interact with people from different cultures and learned other ways of seeing the world.

Brake, N. A., & Sehin, O., & Partain, J. W., & Valles, D., & Marquez, A., & Jimenez, J. A., & Saltsman, G., & Davis, R. (2020, June), Cross-cultural Engineering Skill Development at an International Engineering Summer Boot Camp Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34357

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