Engineering Education Commons^™

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 …

An Engineering Physics Introduction To Electronics For Ece Sophomores, Steve Eugene Watkins

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Electronic devices and circuits are fundamental parts of undergraduate curricula in electrical engineering and computer engineering (ECE). A sophomore-level course that gives a balanced treatment of semiconductor device physics and electronic circuit analysis is described. The course topics are semiconductor physics, diodes, transistors, operational amplifiers, and optoelectronics. The course is a prerequisite for upper-level electronics, semiconductor physics, and semiconductor circuit layout curricula. A stronger link between physical principles and device behavior and an improved sequence in electronics instruction are outcomes.

Educating The Professional Engineer Of 2020: The Changing Licensure Requirements, Susan L. Murray, Terri M. Lynch-Caris

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Engineering education programs would be well served to align their curricula and program outcomes to the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam and Professional Engineer (PE) Exam specifications. These exams are required steps in the process of becoming a licensed engineer in most states. NCEES (the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying) is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing professional licensure for engineers and surveyors. It develops, administers, and scores these examinations used for engineering licensure. Starting in 2011, NCEES held survey-creation meetings with diverse teams to develop a draft survey containing the subjects in each discipline and …

Beyond Jee: Finding Publication Venues To Get Your Message To The ‘Right’ Audience, Amy S. Van Epps

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Very few publications exist outlining the different publishing opportunities within engineering education as a discipline. Most researchers think immediately of the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), and as the primary publication associated with the American Society for Engineering Education it is a logical first thought.

Questions arise with new graduate students and young faculty who are trying to learn the scope of engineering education as a research discipline and need to identify possible publication venues. A broad list of publications has been generated and is maintained by the ASEE Student Division in cooperation with the Center for Engineering Learning and …

Educating For Evidence Based Decisions In Engineering: The View As Librarian And Instructor, Amy S. Van Epps

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The First Year Engineering program at Purdue University is regularly reviewed and revised to adapt to the needs of the students, feedback from teaching faculty, and the changing needs of the university curriculum. In the last year, a unifying theme was added to the class to help tie all the different activities together. That theme was “evidence based decision making in engineering”, a perfect fit for introducing and discussing information literacy many times throughout the semester, rather than in a single, isolated session.

As instructor for one section of the class, the author identifies benefits to including this message throughout …

Public Works For Public Learning: A Case Study, Thalia Anagnos, Beckey Carroll, Shannon Weiss, David Heil

Faculty Publications

Large scale and small scale public works projects are important in the smooth operation of every community, yet a majority of the population has little awareness of how these projects work and what their functions are. Few non-engineers understand the engineering challenges of delivering clean water, disposing of our sewage, or changing a traditional intersection into a round-about, a project that seems quite simple on the surface. A consortium of public works engineers, science museums, faculty, and exhibit evaluators were awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to build an outdoor museum next to a large suspension bridge. The …

The Arrows In Our Backs: Lessons Learned Trying To Change The Engineering Curriculum, Steven W. Villachica, Anthony Wayne Marker, Donald Plumlee, Linda Huglin, Amy Chegash

Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Published research has provided a robust set of documented tools and techniques for transforming individual engineering courses in ways that use evidence-based instructional practices. Many engineering faculty are already aware of these practices and would like to use them. However, they still face significant implementation barriers. The E²R2P effort addresses the question: How can successes in engineering education research translate into widespread instructional practice?

This poster session will describe hard-won lessons the E²R2P team has learned as it begins its third year attempting such curricular change.

Lesson 1: “Wonder workshops” and visible course redesigns don’t produce …

Quantitative Assessment Of Program Outcomes Using Longitudinal Data From The Fe Exam, Joe C. Guarino, James R. Ferguson, V. Krishna C. Pakala

Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There have been many studies providing details on using results from the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam as metrics for meeting ABET program outcomes¹. However, implementing an FE-based set of metrics poses challenges not limited to assessing validity of results. Programs using FE-based metrics must also determine the position of the metrics in the overall assessment process. We present a method for using FE-based metrics as an integral part of the ABET program assessment process. The principle issues we address are: (1) The validity of using FE metrics for a group of graduating students when not all of …

Intradepartmental Collaboration To Improve The Quality Of Engineering Drawings Created By Students In Senior Design Project, Andy S. Zhang, Gaffar Gailani

Publications and Research

Engineers use engineering graphics to describe their design, to exchange ideas, and to communicate with others. As an important communication tool, most engineering department commits at least two courses on engineering graphics. The mechanical engineering technology at the college offers three engineering graphics courses for its associate degree program. The objective is to give students opportunity to get familiar with different type of engineering graphics from 2D to 3D and from general graphics to mechanical engineering specific graphics gradually so they can apply these engineering graphics skills in their senior courses such as in machine design. Despite the extensive offering …

Attracting College And High School Students To Study Engineering Technology Through Hands-On Mechatronics Product Design Projects, Andy S. Zhang, Sidi Berri, Iem H. Heng, Farrukh Zia

Publications and Research

Attracting College and High School Students to Study Engineering Technology Engineering technology encompasses many engineering technology fields: mechanical engineering technology, electrical engineering technology, and computer engineering technology, etc. This poster presents the work on using hands-on mechatronics design activities to attract high school and college students to study engineering technology. Technology education has been a key in producing college graduates to work in today’s fast paced, highly competitive public and private enterprises. Unfortunately, the supply of qualified workforce has been reduced in the United States due to the steady drop of enrollment of college and high school students in STEM …

Public Works Projects As Vehicles For Engineering Education And Outreach, Shannon Weiss, David Heil, Thalia Anagnos

Faculty Publications

America is built on small and large feats of public works engineering that, although often taken for granted, affect almost every aspect of our daily lives. So how can we celebrate these marvels of utilitarian infrastructure and use them to teach public audiences about the engineering principles, materials, and human innovations that make them possible? This case study will share how one project addressed these questions by leveraging informal learning strategies, multi-agency collaborations, and new media technologies to explain the history and engineering of one of the world’s most recognizable public work sites: the Golden Gate Bridge. This paper will …

Curriculum Exchange: “Make Your Own Earthquake”, Sandra Seale, Thalia Anagnos, Lelli Van Den Einde

Faculty Publications

A consortium of American universities is involved in earthquake engineering practice and research. Each campus of the consortium participates in outreach and education activities for the local schools and the public. One campus of the consortium, which operates earthquake field sites, designed a K-12 activity called “Make Your Own Earthquake” (MYOE). MYOE involves setting up earthquake field equipment (seismic instruments, data loggers, and computers) in a classroom. Children jump for 10 seconds, see their earthquake trace live on a computer screen and then take home a printed copy of their personal earthquake. Software was developed specifically for this activity. MYOE …

Curriculum Exchange: Visualization Tools And Online Courses For Teaching About Earthquakes, Sandra Seale, Thalia Anagnos

Faculty Publications

As part of a national consortium of universities practicing and doing research in earthquake engineering, our site has developed several videos for use in outreach and education. Visualization tools are extremely useful when teaching about how earthquakes shake the ground and the response of buildings to that shaking. Here we present videos that are targeted to specific audiences: (1) Animations of the response of two model buildings to two earthquakes are targeted at grade 6-16 students. The videos were created with data recorded on these test structures from the two earthquakes. The two events were both located directly below the …

Lean Integrated Design And Production: A Contractor's Perspective, Fiacra Mcdonnell

Articles

The scenario I have chosen for my paper concentrates on my experiences while employed as a senior estimator with Aidan Elliott Construction Ltd in 2009. Aidan Elliott Construction Ltd was a medium sized building contractor based in the Republic of Ireland. The company in question had an annual turnover of €15m, and was engaged in procuring construction contracts through competitive tendering. The contracts in question ranged in value between €200,000 and €12m. My responsibilities included pricing individual tenders, and compiling all the necessary documentation surrounding the procurement process for that company.As a company, we were pricing work on a competitive …

Exceed: Excellence In Your Engineering Education Summer Transition Program, Stacy Gleixner, Katherine Casey, Jared Tuberty, S. Latic, Patricia Backer, Emily Allen

Faculty Publications

EXCEED: Excellence in Your Engineering Education is a ten day, residential summer transition program that was designed to improve retention and graduation rates at San José State University (SJSU). SJSU is a large, public institution in the West with a very diverse student population. However, the university has lower graduation and retention rates for certain student populations in engineering including underrepresented groups and first generation college students. This transition program was designed to meet five outcomes: acculturate the students to the College of Engineering and the university, enhance math and writing preparation, build community amongst the cohort of students, enhance …

How Important Is The Wow Factor In First Year Engineering Courses?, Thalia Anagnos, Burford Furman, Ping Hsu, Patricia Backer

Faculty Publications

This paper discusses the effectiveness of using projects with a “wow factor,” that is, engaging and challenging hands-on projects, in a freshman engineering course to motivate studentretention and persistence in engineering. Our course enrolls approximately 700 students per year in a lecture/laboratory format. Our university, a large comprehensive public university in thewest, has offered a freshman introduction to engineering course since 1992. In its original form, the course was part of a lower division engineering core, required of all engineering majors, and focused on computational skills (spreadsheets and MATLAB).In 1997, based on faculty and student feedback, a task force was …

Inquiry-Guided Learning (Igl) In Graphical Communications Course, Lulu Sun, Christopher Grant

Publications

Inquiry-Guided Learning (IGL) is an active learning technique which promotes students critical thinking through guided independent investigation of complex problems without a single solution, which has been studied and implemented by many researchers in science and engineering fields [1-8]. It is believed that IGL can provide an opportunity to the students to explore their desires and consequently enhance students’ learning experience in the classroom. Graphical Communications, as a common course taught at first-year undergraduate level at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is designed to familiarize the student with the basic principles of drafting and engineering drawing, to improve three dimensional visualization skills, …

Senior Design Theses: Moving To An Electronic Collection By Collaborating With The School Of Engineering, Susan K. Boyd

Staff publications, research, and presentations

For years, the University Library served as a literal “storage room” for the latest ten years of printed senior design or capstone theses. Both the receiving and cataloging of student undergraduate work were at best “spotty,” and incomplete. By working with the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and departmental administrative assistants, the library and the School of Engineering developed a new process for electronic submission of these documents, and this in turn resulted in the creation of the University Library’s institutional repository called “Scholar Commons.” The first collection within Scholar Commons will showcase the senior design theses. To inform students …

The Fundamentals Of A Course On The Environmental Impacts Of Ships, Patricia A. Coker

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Longitudinal Growth Of Vex Robotic Competitions In Utah And The Rocky Mountain Region, Trevor P. Robinson

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Utah State University VEX Robotics Team (USUVRT) is in its fifth year of promoting the VEX Robotics Competition in the Utah and Rocky Mountain Region. The Robotics Education and Competition Foundation (RECF) annually hosts the VEX World Championships to identify and award the best middle school, high school, and college robotics teams. The USUVRT has partnered with the Rocky Mountain NASA Space Grant Consortium to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) activities via VEX Robotics to middle and high school students in the Utah and Rocky Mountain Region. This paper discusses the outreach methods qualifying system used by …

Development Of Standards, Objectives, And Curriculum Guide To Teach Basic Electronics For Utah Science Credit In Secondary School Education, Rick Pierce

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Recently, the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) has accepted Basic Electronics, Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code 47.0105, as an elective to fill the required third science credit for secondary education (grades 10-12) students. The current Utah state core standards and objectives used for curriculum development in the Basic Electronics classes are now inadequate, as they are more than 15 years old, and designed specifically for students pursuing a technical career path. A formatting change to the document was implemented in 2008, but the standards and objectives were not changed.
Students are subsequently being taught the fundamentals of technology …

An Engineering Design Stem Project: T-Shirt Launcher, Todd D. Fantz, Melva R. Grant

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Technology education has the potential to be the glue for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education through the use of the design process. This should result in increased student interest in science and math, resulting in increased standardized science and math scores (Silk, C. Schunn, & Strand, 2009). In order for this to happen, students need to integrate their grade-level mathematics and science content knowledge in their technology and/or engineering design (Tran & Nathan, 2010). Hopefully, this can be accomplished without losing student interest generated by hands-on, kinesthetic learning. This article provides one example of getting technology education …

A Controlled Study Of The Flipped Classroom With Numerical Methods For Engineers, Jacob L. Bishop

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Recent advances in technology and new ways of using it have led to new possibilities for education research. Increasing tuition costs and free, online course offerings are two influences that have led researchers to re-consider the wisdom of conventional teaching methods and to consider alternatives. The flipped classroom is a new teaching method, which uses video lectures and practice problems as homework, while group-based problem-solving activities are used in the classroom. It combines aspects of two learning theories once thought to be incompatible—constructivism and behaviorism. Active, problem-based learning activities are based on the theories of constructivism, and direct instructional (video) …

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 …

Application Of Archimedes In Three Dimensions And To Solid Mechanics, Jonathan Aziz

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

ARCHIMEDES is a computerized learning system that has helped Syracuse University students overcome the challenges of Engineering Statics since 2009. Its success has motivated application of ARCHIMEDES to three dimensional problems and to problems in Solid Mechanics. Other learning software was investigated before seven Solid Mechanics problems were written for ARCHIMEDES. A 3D graphical interface was developed and evaluated by a field test of student volunteers. Student preferences for various features in 3D learning software were obtained. It is clear from student responses that having a 3D scene to manipulate improves visualization of the problem, mitigating the ambiguity of a …

Integrating Emotional Attachment And Sustainability In Electronic Product Design, Alex Lobos, Callie W. Babbitt

Articles

Current models for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) products encourage frequent product replacement with newer versions that offer only minor incremental improvements. This pattern, named planned obsolescence, diminishes user experience and shortens product lifespan. This paper presents the conceptual basis for a two-part integrated approach to combating planned obsolescence in ICT devices. First, design for emotional attachment, which creates products that users enjoy, value, and use for longer. Second, technological adaptability, which anticipates product upgrades and repairs as new technologies emerge. A model interdisciplinary design course in industrial design and sustainability, also described herein, trains students to apply this approach …

Online Resource Aiding Students To Practice And Perfect Manufacturing Based Skills, Robert Martin Morris, Frank Dunne, Maurice Collins

Papers, presentations and other resources

As part of our teaching in the Departments of Fabrication and Transport Engineering in the Technological University Dublin we use industrial metal folding machines to help students to learn the sequencing of folds on manufactured sheet metal components. Many students have difficulty visualising the folding sequences required to complete practical manufacturing assignments. This paper details the digital media resource which was developed to provide students with the opportunity to offer a proposed solution to questions which relate to the folding sequence required for these components. Feedback is provided through the medium of pre recorded videos which show the component being …

Teaching Technical Engineering Courses From A Christian Perspective: Two Examples, Charles C. Adams

Pro Rege

Engineering professors, like those of the natural sciences, usually teach by breaking the subject matter into parts, that is, courses and activities that are logically abstract from each other. While together comprising a coherent whole, those individual parts too easily foster abstractionism, the view that such subjects as calculus, fluid mechanics, engineering design, and engineering ethics “really are” separable from one another. Such a view militates against a Christian perspective of engineering, technology, and reality in general by replacing the organic wholeness of life before the face of God with the compartmentalization that is characteristic of modern science and naturalism. …

The Decline Of The Car Enthusiasts: Implications For Undergraduate Engineering Education, Mary P. Cardenas

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Hands-on, project-based engineering education is alive and well. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that we are seeing fewer undergraduate engineering students who arrive on campus already knowing how to ‘use their hands’—having familiarity with tools and mechanical devices, knowing how to connect things, savvy about avoiding leaks in fluid systems, wary of stripping a screw thread or shearing a bolt head—the kinds of things that an archetypal car enthusiast would have learned in high school. For design-build-test project-based engineering educational experiences, having at least one car enthusiast has proven invaluable: more time can be spent on testing and re-designing, rather than …

Pattern Of Task Interpretation And Self-Regulated Learning Strategies Of High School Students And College Freshmen During An Engineering Design Project, Oenardi Lawanto, Deborah Butler, Sylvie Cartier, Harry B. Santoso, Wade H. Goodridge, Kevin N. Lawanto, David Clark

Engineering Education Faculty Publications

The objective of this exploratory study was to describe patterns in self-regulated learning (SRL) for secondary school and college freshmen while engaged in a design activity. The main research question guiding the study was: In what ways did secondary and first year college students differ in addressing an engineering design project? Specific focus was given by exploring how these two groups of students compared in their (1) task interpretation in relation to reported strategy use during the design process; and (2) task interpretation in relation to reported strategy use in project management. Students at one high school in the state …