Virtual On line
June 22, 2020
June 22, 2020
June 26, 2021
Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session
16
10.18260/1-2--34461
https://peer.asee.org/34461
457
Al Ferri received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University in 1981 and his PhD degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1985. Since 1985, he has been a faculty member in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where he now serves as Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. His research areas are in the fields of dynamics, controls, vibrations, and acoustics. He is also active in course and curriculum development. He is a Fellow of the ASME.
Prof. Craig has been on the faculty at Georgia Tech for more than fifty years and continues to teach as an emeritus professor and to develop classroom engagement methods and tools. His past research is in the general area of experimental structural mechanics, dynamics and structural control with applications to aerospace and earthquake engineering. He is coauthor of a textbook on structural analysis with application to aerospace structures.
Dr. Bonnie Ferri is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and a Vice Provost. She performs research in the areas of active learning, embedded controls and computing, and hands-on education. She received the IEEE Undergraduate Education Award and the Regents Award for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She received her BS in EE from Notre Dame, her MS in ME/AE from Princeton, and her PhD in EE from Georgia Tech.
Dr. Meltem Alemdar is Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Tech's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC). Dr. Alemdar has experience evaluating programs that fall under the umbrella of educational evaluation, including K-12 educational curricula, K-12 STEM programs after-school programs, and comprehensive school reform initiatives. Across these evaluations, she has used a variety of evaluation methods, ranging from a multi-level evaluation plan designed to assess program impact to methods such as program monitoring designed to facilitate program improvement. She received her Ph.D. in Research, Measurement and Statistics from the Department of Education Policy at Georgia State University (GSU).
Benjamin Klein received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2000. From 2000-2003, Dr. Klein served as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, carrying out theoretical analysis and computer simulations of semiconductor photonic devices. Dr. Klein first joined Georgia Tech as an ECE faculty member based at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus in 2003, and in 2012, he transferred to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. Effective January 2018, Dr. Klein was appointed as the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering's associate chair for Graduate Affairs.
Active learning is known to promote a deeper understanding and retention of concepts. Hands-on learning is a particular form of active learning where students engage in a topic in several different ways including sight, sound, and tactile sensory input. While engaging multiple senses, students can interact with other students and reflect on how their understanding of some topic can be used to explain a particular phenomenon. When the hands-on experiences are well-designed, students can go beyond the lecture material and observe how theory is manifested in the real world. Unfortunately, many engineering experiments are costly and complicated, restricting their use to instructional laboratories. One of the goals of this NSF IUSE project is to create simple hands-on experiments that can be highly portable for use in lecture rooms, laboratories, or even dorm rooms. Due to advances in portable data acquisition devices, laptop computers, and affordable sensors, there is an unprecedented opportunity to make hands-on engineering experiments a reality. The use of analog circuits constructed from breadboards and electrical components (resistors, capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc) has already made considerable inroads in electrical engineering education. One goal of this project is to bring equally effective and affordable solutions to the fields of mechanical engineering (ME) and aerospace engineering (AE).
Making ME and AE hands-on experiments more portable and affordable would allow them to be used in different settings such as classrooms and dormitories, but there are significant challenges. Many ME and AE experiments require moving parts, fluid flow under pressure, structures, thermal effects all at a scale that students can see, touch, or hear the physical phenomena being investigated. This research builds upon our previous work in hands-on pedagogy in the ECE education and seeks to apply it to new platforms designed for ME and AE subjects. Among the research questions that are being addressed several stand out: Which topics have the greatest potential for enhancing educational outcomes through hands-on learning? What is the impact of the experiments on student performance, on student interest and confidence in the subject matter, and on long-term retention of the knowledge? Do these experiments have a positive impact on students from underrepresented groups in terms of performance, student interest, and retention? Since hands-on education is often associated with collaboration and group work, what are the best practices for impromptu team work, especially in the context of diversity and underrepresentation in these student groups? To address these research question, the research has several objectives. One goal is to develop experimental platforms and supplemental materials to support the learning of basic concepts and higher-level thinking processes in ME and AE courses. Part of this effort entails designing short learning experiences that are well thought out, and involve adequate levels of engagement and reflection. We also seek to develop appropriate assessment techniques to measure the effect of the hands-on experiments. Finally, we are developing strategies for managing impromptu team-work between small numbers of students so that all team members are equally engaged and included in the learning process. This is particularly important for female and underrepresented groups within STEM fields.
Ferri, A. A., & Craig, J. I., & Ferri, B. H., & Alemdar, M., & Klein, B. (2020, June), Development of Team-Based Hands-On Learning Experiences Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34461
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