Engineering Commons^™

Do After-School Robotics Programs Expand The Pipeline Into Stem Majors In College?, Cathy Burack, Alan Melchior, Matthew Hoover

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

One result of the growing concerns over the numbers of young people moving into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-related careers has been the expansion of formal and informal STEM education programming for pre-college youth, from elementary school through high school. While the number of programs has grown rapidly, there is little research on their long-term impacts on participant education and career trajectories. This paper presents interim findings from a multi-year longitudinal study of three national after-school robotics programs that engage students in designing, building, and competing complex robots with the goal of inspiring long-term interest in STEM. Focusing on …

Weather Courtyard: Reflections On Interactive Stem Learning Spaces, Ryan Day

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

In this article, the author discusses his experiences in service-oriented engineering developing an interactive weather station for DCES students. Day details this process and the lessons learned over the course of the project development, as well as the project’s influence on his aspirations for a career in civil and environmental engineering. To provide substantive takeaways from the project, he concludes by reviewing the benefits of interactive STEM learning spaces in the instructional environment and links them to the impacts of the weather station project on the community.

Debugging: The Key To Unlocking The Mind Of A Novice Programmer?, Anthony A. Lowe

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

Novice programmers must master two skills to show lasting success: writing code and, when that fails, the ability to debug it. Instructors spend much time teaching the details of writing code but debugging gets significantly less attention. But what if teaching debugging could implicitly teach other aspects of coding better than teaching a language teaching debugging? This paper explores a new theoretical framework, the Theory of Applied Mind for Programming (TAMP), which merges dual process theory with Jerome Bruner’s theory of representations to model the mind of a programmer. TAMP looks to provide greater explanatory power in why novices struggle …

Argument-Driven Engineering In Middle School Science: An Exploratory Study Of Changes In Engineering Identity Over An Academic Year, Lawrence Chu, Victor Sampson, Todd L. Hutner, Stephanie Rivale, Richard H. Crawford, Christina L. Baze, Hannah S. Brooks

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

The goal of this study was to examine how the use of a new instructional model is related to changes in middle school students’ engineering identity. The intent of this instructional model, which is called argument-driven engineering (ADE), is to give students opportunities to design and critique solutions to meaningful problems using the core ideas and practices of science and engineering. The model also reflects current recommendations found in the literature for supporting the development or maintenance of engineering identity. This study took place in the context of an eighth-grade science classroom in order to explore how middle school students’ …

The Effect Of Teacher Professional Development On Implementing Engineering In Elementary Schools, Teresa Porter, Meg E. West, Rachel L. Kajfez, Kathy L. Malone, Karen E. Irving

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Increased attention on the implementation of engineering education into elementary school classrooms aims to start preparing students early for potential engineering careers. In order to efficiently and effectively add engineering concepts to the curriculum, appropriate development and facilitation of engineering design challenges are required. Therefore, professional development programs are necessary to educate teachers about engineering and how to adequately teach it. This paper explores the effects of an engineering professional development program for practicing teachers. The program included training elementary teachers about how to implement units from Engineering is Elementary (EiE) by the Science Museum of Boston into their classes. …

Elementary Teachers’ Positive And Practical Risk-Taking When Teaching Science Through Engineering Design, Jeffrey Radloff, Brenda Capobianco, Annie Dooley

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This study examines the perspectives of three generations of elementary teachers learning to teach science using engineering design and the risks associated with implementing this innovative type of reform-based science instruction. Data were gathered using semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and teacher reflections. Data analysis entailed open coding and document analysis. The findings indicated that there were four types of perceived risks: practical, pedagogical, conceptual, and personal. First-generation teachers exhibited conceptual risk-taking behavior, while second- and third-generation teachers reported practical, pedagogical, and personal risks. Benefits of risk-taking included increased student engagement in science, improved self-confidence in teaching science, and greater teacher …

A Systematic Review Of Studies On Educational Robotics, Saira Anwar, Nicholas Alexander Bascou, Muhsin Menekse, Asefeh Kardgar

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

There has been a steady increase in the number of studies investigating educational robotics and its impact on academic and social skills of young learners. Educational robots are used both in and out of school environments to enhance K–12 students’ interest, engagement, and academic achievement in various fields of STEM education. Some prior studies show evidence for the general benefits of educational robotics as being effective in providing impactful learning experiences. However, there appears to be a need to determine the specific benefits which have been achieved through robotics implementation in K–12 formal and informal learning settings. In this study, …

Diversity In Engineering Technology Students, Eliabeth Dell, Anne M. Lucietto, Elaine Cooney, Lisa Russell, Emily Schott

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

In the US, there are two academic pathways to a career in engineering: Engineering and Engineering Technology (ET). Engineering Technology attracts more African American and Latin American students than traditional engineering programs. Nationally, African American students are more than twice as likely to enroll in an ET program versus Engineering. We suspect it may be due to traditional Engineering programs’ requirement of higher levels of math and science classes, often lacking in under-privileged or underserved urban or rural high schools. Recently published research by the New York Equity Coalition supports this supposition. Understanding the reasons for the higher representation of …

Engineering Technology Graduates: A Survey Of Demographics And Mentoring, Anne M. Lucietto, Elizabeth Dell, Elaine M. Cooney, Lisa Ann Russel, Emily Schott

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

Early in 2017, a team of engineering technology practitioners along with others interested in the state of engineering technology published a report entitled “Engineering Technology Education in the United States.” This report garnered a list of recommendations and things that needed to be investigated to further our understanding of this student population; specifically focusing on the students and how they relate to other students studying both similar and different material. A team of like-minded engineering technology education researchers have been working together to ascertain the answers to the findings. They prepared two surveys, obtained institutional approval, and distributed it throughout …

Engineering Technology Undergraduate Students: A Survey Of Demographics And Mentoring, Anne M. Lucietto, Elizabeth Dell, Elaine M. Cooney, Lisa Ann Russell, Emily Schott

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

A report published by a group of engineering technology practitioners and others interested in engineering technology called “Engineering Technology Education in the United States” was released in early 2017. The report provided recommendations of areas for further study related to engineering technology students to increase our understanding of the population. These specifically suggested focusing on the students in comparison to other students in similar and different fields of study. Following these recommendations, a team of engineering technology education researchers has been collaborating to gather information in these areas. The team obtained institutional approval and distributed two surveys throughout the United …

Construction Management Technology Students Choice Of Major, Anthony E. Sparkling, Anne M. Lucietto, Aayushi Sinha, Trenton Thomas Hasser

School of Engineering Education Faculty Publications

This study explores the following research questions: 1) What are the common attributes of college students that decide to pursue CM degrees; and, 2) What key motivational drivers that encourage students to remain in STEM majors? The study population considered were those students enrolled in CM undergraduate degree program in the United States (US). Over 100 students participated in an online survey to assess their backgrounds and experiences. Results illustrate early career decisions and other underlying motives shape students’ decisions to pursue CM undergraduate degree programs. Key drivers such as family background, personal interests, and role models/mentors are related to …

The Relationship Between Engineering Identity And Belongingness On Certainty Of Majoring In Engineering For First-Generation College Students, Dina Verdín, Allison Godwin

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This paper seeks to understand the factors that support first-generation college students’ certainty of majoring in engineering. Data used in this study came from thirty-two four-year ABET- accredited institutions across the United States which has a total sample of 790 first-generation college students. We used the frameworks of engineering role identity and sense of belonging to understand the factors that influence first-generation college students’ certainty of majoring in engineering. Certainty is referred to as the degree of confidence or decisiveness an individual has with regard to their chosen occupational plans. First, we examine how first-generation college students’ engineering role identity …

(Poster) A Bird's-Eye View Of What Learners Like And Dislike About Stem Moocs Using Topic Modeling, Abigail Gentry

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are offered for many different subject areas such as STEM, Arts, Medicine, and Business, with differences in each subject area. In this study, we focus on STEM MOOCs and their unique challenges. In order to design better MOOCs to encourage engagement, it is important to understand learners expectations and preferences based on the subject area by analyzing end-of-course evaluation surveys of STEM MOOCs. We analyzed open-ended learner feedback for two post-survey questions for 110 unique STEM MOOCs (some with multiple re-runs) with a total of 8100 responses, offered on the FutureLearn platform. The end-of-course survey …

(Poster) Freshman Engineering Student Engagement Through Sport’S Data Analytics, Adam Tennant

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

Instructors of engineering for the last quarter of a century have attempted to engage undergraduates through project based learning. Often these topics can fall short due to a lack of interest by the students. Faculty-lead student research experiences addressing pop-culture topics of interest can often stimulate student engagement and have the possibility to positively impact student-retention rates. This presentation reports on the preliminary findings of a sport’s data analytics approach for faculty-led student investigations and increased engagement. Freshman engineering students will rank teams or individuals through the PageRank algorithm creating a model of the complexity of sports. The specifics of …

(Poster) Deepening Engineering Design Experience: A Novel Approach To Senior Design, Donald Peterson, Mansour Tahernezhadi, Abul Azad

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

This poster advances a new framework for the senior design course in order to deepen engineering design experience for engineering students. The proposed framework for the new senior design course while retains the traditional topics such as problem identification, conceptual design and analysis, prototyping and the preparation of a work schedule required to carry out the project, it fosters an early in the cycle start, typically after week 6, towards the design conceptualization and prototyping in the first academic semester. This is in stark contrast with traditional practices where the design conceptualization and prototyping largely takes place in the second …

Refining An Instrument And Studying Elementary Teachers’ Understanding Of The Scope Of Engineering, Jacob Pleasants, Joanne K. Olson

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

To effectively incorporate engineering into their instruction, K–12 teachers need sufficient knowledge of the engineering discipline. An important component of teachers’ engineering knowledge is their understanding of the nature of engineering: what engineers do, the epistemological underpinnings of engineering, and the relationships between engineering and other fields of study. In this study, we present a quantitative tool that was developed to assess teachers’ knowledge of a particular nature of engineering dimension: the scope of engineering, which describes the demarcation between engineering and non-engineering. This tool was used to assess the knowledge of teachers and engineering graduate students, before and after …

(Poster) Pneumatically Assisted Autocutter: Providing A Safe Workplace Environment For People With Disabilities, Ryan Kallenberger, Brian Galliher, Laura Johnson, Melanie Moore, Joseph Herzog, Renny Fernandez, Najmus Saqib

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

We present a pneumatic autocutter to help workers with disabilities for reduced operator fatigue, increased efficiency, thereby giving enhanced capabilities when working on a production line without worrying about their ability to effectively do their jobs. We are students in a sophomore level six sigma based course through the R.B. Annis School of Engineering at the University of Indianapolis. The specific process of production being discussed involves cutting bulky cardboard frames with a metallic wire-mesh covering. The current process requires a considerable amount of physical labor from the operator; prolonged work results in gradial operator debility and injury. For Gateway …

(Poster) Citizens Energy Group: Mobile Water Distribution System For Providing Water And Reducing Plastic Waste, Alex Pruitt, Alysa Epperson, Jonathen Key, Victor Antoñon Rodriguez, Paul Talega, George Ricco, Suranga Dharmarathne, David Olawale, Najmus Saqib, James Emery

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

During the 2017-2018 year, Citizens Energy Group partnered with the R.B. Annis school of engineering to develop a portable system to distribute water to people at outdoor events. During that academic year, initial designs and a small scale, functional prototype were completed. This year we built the full scale version. Throughout this project, we have implemented the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) methodology to guide the design process. Within the R.B. Annis School of Engineering, this methodology has been adapted into the DesignSpine process. It’s a gate based process that uses gateways at key points in the design process to …

A Model For Incorporating Undergraduate Research Into An Engineering Curriculum, Douglas Stamps

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

A model is described for incorporating undergraduate research into an engineering curriculum through a vertically integrated design sequence. The sequence is composed of five courses: one each during the spring semester of the freshmen through junior years and two courses during the senior year. Each course offers skills that provide scaffolding for students to contribute to a team performing an engineering design project or research project. Teams are composed of freshmen through seniors (i.e., vertically integrated) and led by seniors. A strength of the model for undergraduate research is that upper level students can mentor lower level students, which allows …

Writing Children’S Stories To Improve Engineering Student’S Communication With Non-Engineering Audiences, Benjamin D. Mcpheron, Katelyn J. Butler

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

One of the biggest challenges for students in science and engineering is communicating technical information to a non-technical audience. Students may struggle because they are not adept writers, because they cannot divorce the ideas from the jargon, or because they simply don't understand the material well enough to explain it to someone else. To attempt to address this issue, this study proposes the use of children’s stories to help students practice writing for a target, non-technical audience. To measure the efficacy of this method, junior level engineering students in an electronics course in Fall 2018 were asked to write children’s …

Application Of Computational Tools To Spaghetti-Based Truss Bridge Design, Jin Xu, Jiliang Li, Nuri Zeytinoglu, Jinyuan Zhai

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

Application of Computational Tools to Spaghetti-Based Truss Design

Statics and Strength of Materials are two foundational courses for Mechanical/Civil Engineering. In order to assist students in better understanding and applying concepts to a meaningful design task, SolidWorks and theoretical calculation were used for a spaghetti-bridge design contest with the constraints of given maximum weight and allowable support-material weight. As the first step of this iterative designing process, both extrude feature and structural member were introduced to model planar bridge trusses. Then SolidWorks’ Statics module was used to run FEA analysis of the structural performance in efforts to optimize the …

Innovative Remote Smart Home For Immersive Engagement, Kevin B. Martin, Abul Azad, Mohammed Adnan Shareef, Mrinal Roy

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

An openly accessible, remotely operated smart home will be demonstrated as a tool for students to learn about residential energy usage and environmental impacts. Specifically, the demonstration unit provides classrooms an engaging experience that teaches students about energy efficiency technologies and how their behavior will have an impact on energy usage and the environment. It is expected that as students become aware of and understand how various energy efficiency technologies work barriers to their adoption will be lowered. The use of a web accessible, remote laboratory dramatically reduces lab setup time and equipment cost/space requirements for educators. Special attention is …

Development Of A Set Of Pre-Class Videos For Electromagnetic Theory, Benjamin Mcpheron, Josiah D. Kunz

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

One important aspect of experiential learning is allowing students time to reflect on new concepts before the application of the material. Most commonly, this is attempted by assigning readings from a textbook, but research suggests that few students complete these readings. This discouraging fact has prompted the use of other resources, such as videos, to supplement pre-class readings in order to introduce new material. Previous work has been completed by this author to produce pre-class videos for use in an introductory circuits course. This paper extends that work to the development of pre-class videos for a senior level electrical engineering …

Student Success And Retention From The Perspectives Of Engineering Students And Faculty, Amy Chan-Hilton

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

Student retention and success is a complex issue, with many factors that impact an individual student’s retention and these factors varying across all of our students. At the University of Southern Indiana (USI), efforts within engineering, as well as across the college and university, have included intentional academic support services (such as expanded advising and tutoring services) and student development programs and extracurricular activities to foster student communities and a student’s sense of belonging. In addition, evidence indicates that implementing curricular changes across an engineering program and within specific courses, such as implementing active learning, instructional innovations, and high-impact practices, …

Disciplinary Learning From An Authentic Engineering Context, Catherine Langman, Judith Zawojewski, Patricia Mcnicholas, Ali Cinar, Eric Brey, Mustafa Bilgic, Hamidreza Mehdizadeh

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

This small-scale design study describes disciplinary learning in mathematical modeling and science from an authentic engineeringthemed module. Current research in tissue engineering served as source material for the module, including science content for readings and a mathematical modeling activity in which students work in small teams to design a model in response to a problem from a client. The design of the module was guided by well-established principles of model-eliciting activities (a special class of problem-solving activities deeply studied in mathematics education) and recently published implementation design principles, which emphasize the portability of model-eliciting activities to many classroom settings.

Two …

Recognizing Engineering Students’ Funds Of Knowledge: Creating And Validating Survey Measures, Dina Verdín, Jessica M. Smith, Juan Lucena

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This research base paper examines students who are the first in their families to attend college. Our research seeks to understand the role students’ funds of knowledge makes in first-generation college students’ undergraduate experience. Funds of knowledge are the set of formal/informal knowledge and skills that students learn through family, friends, and communities outside of academic institutions. This paper reports funds of knowledge themes relevant to first-generation college students in engineering and the process of gathering validity evidence to support the funds of knowledge themes.

Using ethnographic and interview data, six themes emerged: connecting experiences, community networks, tinkering knowledge, perspective …

Board 51: An Initial Step Towards Measuring First-Generation College Students’ Personal Agency: A Scale Validation, Dina Verdín, Allison Godwin

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

This research paper describes the development of a scale to measure how first-generation college students use engineering as a tool for making a difference in their community and world or personal agency. Personal agency is a capability that every individual holds; it is described by Bandura as an individual’s beliefs about their capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives through purposeful and reflective actions. Agentic actions allow students to explore, maneuver and impact their environment for the achievement of a goal or set of goals. This study identifies how cognitive processes of forethought, intention, reactivity, and reflection …

Eager: Broadening Participation Of First-Generation College Student, Jessica M. Smith, Dina Verdín, Juan C. Lucena

School of Engineering Education Graduate Student Series

No abstract provided.