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Work in Progress: Engineering Analysis Laboratory Courses Complement First-Year Physics and Calculus

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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

First-Year Programs Division WIPS 3: Courses and Curricula

Tagged Division

First-Year Programs Division (FYP)

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--48353

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/48353

Download Count

92

Paper Authors

biography

Bryan Ranger Boston College Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4774-3587

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Bryan Ranger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at Boston College. He earned his Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M.S.E. and B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan. His research interests include medical devices and instrumentation, ultrasound, global health, AI/machine learning for image analysis, healthcare innovation, and biomedical engineering education.

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biography

Avneet Hira Boston College

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Dr. Avneet Hira is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Centered Engineering Program and the Department of Teaching, Curriculum and Society (by courtesy) at Boston College.

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Siddhartan Govindasamy Boston College Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-0150-9357

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Siddhartan Govindasamy is a Professor of Engineering at Boston College, where he is a founding faculty member of the program in Human-Centered Engineering. Prior to Boston College, he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, where he was part of the team of faculty who redesigned the introductory mathematics, physics and engineering course sequence to become more integrated.

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Abstract

In this Work in Progress paper, we describe two, two-credit engineering courses taken by all first-year engineering majors at our university. First-year engineering students in most universities and colleges take several courses in physics and calculus offered by physics and mathematics departments. These courses typically serve a wide range of majors and hence there is limited opportunity to draw connections between the material to engineering applications. This limited connection is one of the factors attributable to students feeling a disconnect between the foundational physics and mathematics courses they take and the engineering topics that drew them to the major in the first place. This disconnect has been identified as a contributing factor to the relatively large attrition of students out of engineering majors and disproportionately impacts students from minoritized groups. The courses described in this paper are explicitly designed to help students connect the physics and calculus courses they take in the first year to engineering applications, in addition to reinforcing physics and calculus concepts. These courses are taken in consecutive semesters in the students’ first-year, the first of which substitutes for the companion laboratory course to the Physics I course offered by the physics department. These courses take a design-and-build approach (as opposed to an experiment-and-measure approach) to topics such as kinematics and applications of integration such as in solving problems like in finding the center of mass of objects. Students gave very high ratings to the course overall in student evaluations, and cite the connections between mathematics and physics with engineering applications as one of the course’s strengths. Further, we believe that these courses are factors, among others, that contribute to the low attrition rate from our engineering program.

Ranger, B., & Hira, A., & Govindasamy, S. (2024, June), Work in Progress: Engineering Analysis Laboratory Courses Complement First-Year Physics and Calculus Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--48353

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