Engineering Commons^™

Visualizing Mechanics: Improving Student Learning Through Video Demonstrations, Blake A. Wetherton, Olumide A. Awofeso, Carolyn E. Creighton, Adam F. Potrzebowski, Charles M. Krousgrill, Jeffrey F. Rhoads

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom (PMFC) is a project that seeks to reform engineering mechanics education by integrating content and technology; enhancing communication between students, their peers, and instructors; accommodating a broader range of learning styles; and facilitating greater depths of understanding. In an attempt to increase the PMFC’s efficacy, a series of demonstration videos has been produced. As demonstrated by the popularity and pervasiveness of websites such as YouTube, short videos have the potential to captivate audiences. As such, these videos have incredible promise in educational contexts. In the PMFC series of videos, entitled Visualizing Mechanics, each imitates the …

Development Of Pneumatic Robot For Outreach, Eshamogbo E. Ojuba, John Lumkes

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

To encourage the current generation of high school and middle school students to pursue careers in engineering, it is important to have challenging hands-on engineering activities for them. Such activities should be interesting, compelling, and, most importantly, educative. A mini-excavator was built for fluid power outreach, but this tool only demonstrates fluid power, without showing other important aspects of engineering. The tool being developed is able to demonstrate fluid power, as well as other important aspects of engineering, such as controls, electronics, and programming. This tool is an electronically-controlled device that allows the user control a pneumatic circuit, coupled with …

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design, Hanjun Xian

Open Access Dissertations

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice.

This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is …

Why Do Indiana Pre-Service Technology Education Majors Choose The Profession, Traves L. Freeland

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

The purpose of this descriptive study was to look at the factors that influence pre-service technology education majors to choose to become teachers. The pre-service teachers of three Indiana technology education teacher preparatory programs were given an internet survey to collect demographic data and determine what factors influence current pre-service teachers. The results of this study were compared to the results from a study done by Harris (2007). The findings resulted in similar factors that were the most common identified as being influential. Those factors included personal interest or hobbies, high school or middle school teacher, and past experiences in …

Cleerhub.Org Adoption By Eafit University Engineering Faculty Members: A Longitudinal Study, Diego M. Mendez Mena

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

The main purpose of this study is to identify and comprehend faculty members’ perception of attributes of the diffusion of the technological innovation CLEERhub.org at EAFIT University, College of Engineering, in Medellin, Colombia. Moreover, this work attempts to understand causes and motivators that might lead to innovation adoption or rejection. The Diffusion of Innovations Theory serves as the framework to develop an appropriate assessing instrument that allows accurate measuring of user opinions towards the practice of CLEERhub.org in their educational research work in Engineering. In order to correctly assess user perception of the embracement process of such technological/cyberinfrastructure innovation, the …