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Reflections on Integrating MATLAB Grader across a Mechanical Engineering Curriculum

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

June 26, 2024

Conference Session

MECH - Technical Session 11: Integration of Problem-Solving and Design Thinking

Tagged Division

Mechanical Engineering Division (MECH)

Page Count

28

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47932

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47932

Download Count

98

Paper Authors

biography

Patrick M Comiskey Milwaukee School of Engineering Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9991-7673

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Patrick Comiskey is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. He received his B.S. from that institution and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, both in mechanical engineering. His teaching and research interests are in the area of transport phenomena and engineering education.

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Prabhakar Venkateswaran Milwaukee School of Engineering

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Prabhakar Venkateswaran is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Department Vice Chairperson at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. He received his Master's and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his Bachelor of Science degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Miami, Coral Gables. His teaching and research interests are in the area of thermal-fluid sciences, gas turbines, gas dynamics, and engineering education.

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Michael Christopher Sevier Milwaukee School of Engineering

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Michael Sevier is currently an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. After finishing his doctorate degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Michael took a position at ATA Engineering where he worked as a structural analysis engineer for nine years. During this time, he both took and taught multiple professional courses and realized how many technically brilliant instructors struggled to convey information in a way that could be readily absorbed by the students. Now in his eighth year in academia Michael is researching how various teaching methods and study habits affect the absorption and long-term retention of class material in the hopes of best preparing students for their future as engineers.

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Abstract

In this paper, the authors document their experiences implementing MATLAB Grader in several mechanical engineering courses spanning from 1st year core courses to 4th year electives at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI). MATLAB Grader is an online browser-based version of MATLAB where instructors can create, share, and automatically assess MATLAB exercises with their students. The sustained effort by the authors to incorporate MATLAB Grader in their courses was motivated by an intent to help students develop an analytical mindset so that they can ultimately successfully engage in more realistic design-type problems. MATLAB Grader facilitated this goal by presenting students with opportunities to analyze trends with parametric variations as opposed to focusing on a single answer for one set of conditions. In addition, problems can also be scaffolded so that students receive instantaneous feedback on intermediate stages of a complex problem. Furthermore, the authors have often grappled with how to best grade programming-based assignments. MATLAB Grader is an excellent platform that addresses these objectives and desires.

This work is unique in that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the use of MATLAB grader in mechanical engineering courses is not well-documented. There is more evidence of its use in the electrical/computer engineering discipline, but evidence of its use in mechanical engineering is more limited. As a result, this paper represents an effort to share the pedagogical and practical benefits as well as the challenges and drawbacks of using this platform. Based on their experiences, the authors also seek to share guidelines that they have developed for instructors considering the use of MATLAB Grader in their mechanical engineering courses. These guidelines are tailored to the cohort of students i.e. 1st year, 2nd year, etc. as well as the type of course taught i.e. programming course versus a problem-solving course like statics/dynamics versus a numerical methods course such as finite element methods.

Comiskey, P. M., & Venkateswaran, P., & Sevier, M. C. (2024, June), Reflections on Integrating MATLAB Grader across a Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47932

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015