The Dartmouth concept: learning in the real world

In an innovative program Dartmouth engineering students are sent to Jersey City, where they spend a term divided between teaching and performing an engineering task within the city administration. They help to coach inner-city high school seniors in the material of the ``Man-Made World,' and teach them the computer language, Basic, together with hands-on operation of a terminal connected to a time-sharing computer system. They also evaluate and help to develop methods for improving the operations of municipal offices and functions that come under the control of the Jersey City government. The program is designed to give the student a foretaste of the challenges he will face as an engineer once he leaves the cloistered halls of learning for the real world.     

Software engineering education: Status and prospects

Software engineering is an emerging field aimed at improving the quality of computer software and the processess used to produce it. The field seeks to transform software creation from an art into an engineering discipline. Efforts have recently begun to teach software engineering concepts to university students and to practicing professionals in industry and government. This paper surveys past and present efforts in software engineering education, describes some existing problems in training software engineers, and outlines likely future developments in educational programs. The outline of a curriculum for a professional master's degree in software engineering is included.     

Motivation and Learning Progress Through Educational Games

In engineering, we are often faced with the problem of how to teach complex theoretical material to students who are mainly interested in solving practical problems. This gap between the application-oriented expectation of the learner and the theory-focused material chosen by the lecturer may end up causing high barriers for the learning performance of the students. This becomes obvious if we recall that motivation is a cornerstone for good learning. One way to close this gap between theory and practice is educational games. In this paper, we show how educational games can exemplarily help to motivate and teach undergraduate university students in a basic automatic control course. The success of this approach can, for example, be seen from the course evaluations and feedback from our students.     

Teaching control system design through mechatronics: academic and industrial perspectives

The present approach to teaching control system design as a stand-alone course offered late in the undergraduate curriculum, with little discussion of hardware, implementation, or integration through design, is ineffective in preparing students for engineering practice. Control systems must be integrated into the design from the beginning and not be simply after-thought add-ons. Based on the authors' extensive experience teaching mechatronics to university students and professional engineers, an integrated mechatronic approach to teaching controls is proposed. This approach will seriously address the deficiencies in the present-day skills of working professionals, as observed by the authors in teaching professional engineering workshops. These deficiencies are a direct result of how we presently teach controls and related topics.     

电子信息类课程的学习接受过程和教学设计分析研究

本文对教学和学习的基本原理做了回顾,分析了电子信息类课程体系设置的特点和主要相关课程的特点,剖析了现有电子信息类课程体系设置下学习者面临的问题和困难,提出在教学设计中要多采用例子和背景介绍,注重引导学生兴趣,帮助学生设立明确的学习目标,建立合适的学习动机。最后探讨了完全意义上的启发式教学,提出了完全启发式教学和传统系统教学相结合的教学设计。     

Professional writers have a classroom role

Professional technical writers have a role to play as instructors in technical writing programs, as they are experts in the tools, procedures, and policies of a professional documentation department. When a writer enters the classroom, the writer, the writer's employer, the students, and the academic institution all benefit. Preparing to teach a course is not difficult, as the article explains     

The challenge of getting technical experts to talk: whyinterviewing skills are crucial to the technical communicationcurriculum

Those involved in journalism and communication programs recognize the need to teach students interviewing theory and techniques. Technical communicators rely on interviews for a significant percentage of the information they need to do their jobs. Interviewing techniques are ranked in the top ten topics that technical communicators think should be taught in technical writing programs. The author describes a course with a general focus on interviewing skills and a particular emphasis on the challenges technical communicators face in the interview situation     

Real-time and embedded systems - teaching reliability

Computer science students routinely practice just-in-time software engineering that results in solutions to programming assignments that barely limp through the test cases. Worse, when they have access to the test suite used for grading, students who have reached an impasse will often resort to a kind of evolutionary programming where they incrementally tweak parts of a program, test the code, and repeat. This random walk through the program space can move programs away from correctness rather than toward it. Embedded systems, with their concurrency, resource limitations, flaky tools, and all-too-frequent debugging through LEDs and logic analyzers, provide the perfect environment for students to experience some truly difficult debugging. Embedded systems must be reliable, but computer science students aren't in the habit of creating reliable software. It will be better, if we explicitly teach them techniques that can increase software reliability even though this reduces the amount of time we can spend on more traditional technical material.     

Teaching analysis to a computer-weaned generation: asking questions

It is widely acknowledged that the construction of working algorithms for prediction and performance assessment in the class of computationally-large real-world problems-loosely characterized as "wave interactions with complex environments"-is aided substantially by embedding analytic problem-matched physics-based modeling within numerical algorithms for greater computational efficiency and better understanding of complex wave phenomenology. To teach the necessary analytic underpinnings to a generation of students that has grown up with computers-commonly believing that computers, as such, solve complex problems, and that the printouts furnish physical insight-is a challenge to the academic community. Some reflections are aired here, using tongue-in-cheek humor to look at certain foibles in the engineering profession     

Engineering Communication An Analytical Method of Teaching Engineers to Communicate

Engineering students , even some who have previously lost interest in English, become enthusiastic learners when they are shown that the ability to communicate precisely is a necessary part of engineering. Accepting this thesis, the Engineering School at Arizona State University in 1955 incorporated an engineering communications course into the core of all degree programs. In the fourteen years the course has been offered, it has been successfully completed by about two thousand students, with an average failure of about three percent. This high percentage of completion is attributed to three things: the communication skills developed are related to the work of engineers; the teaching method is analytical; and the student's work is carefully evaluated by the instructor and revised by the student when not acceptable. The instructor is, of course, another prime factor; a few have been unable to teach the course effectively. In addition to other capabilities, the instructor of this course must be willing to accept the fact that he is teaching the course to make a better engineer-not a journalist, orator, or technical writer. The instructor must also have a firm grasp of English grammar and a certain amount of technology, preferably including prior industrial experience related to the work of engineers.     

Expanding our students' brainpower: idea generation and critical thinking skills

How do we teach our students to think? This is not a skill that they can pick up by doing "X" number of homework problems; it is the product of good habits that must be practiced and honed on a daily basis. It is a state of mind that continually questions "Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?" In light of this reality, we developed this segment for the "Introduction to Literature Review and Proposal Writing" graduate course this past summer. Our goals during this three-day class period were: /spl middot/ To define the creative process /spl middot/ To identify techniques that enhance creativity /spl middot/ To practice idea generation and critical thinking skills in controlled settings This segment helps smooth the transition between the undergraduate mentality of "teach me" to the desired graduate-student mentality of "enable me." It attempts to demystify the creative process, which most people associate with inspired moments and geniuses, so that students can deliberately foster an atmosphere that will help them generate new research ideas.     

Public policy and technical communication across the curriculum atthe Colorado School of Mines

Many engineering students are unprepared to address public policy issues because their education is fragmented: they tend to focus narrowly on technical solutions to closed-end problems in engineering and science courses, and they do not see how technical communication relates to either engineering or public policy. A multidisciplinary approach to professional communication which addresses this fragmentation is discussed. In the four-semester engineering practices introductory course sequence (EPICS) program, students learn professional communication skills by working in groups on `real world' projects for which industry and government professionals serve as clients. These open-ended problems involve numerous nontechnical constraints, including a variety of public policy issues. Communication skills and the important connections among competent technical analysis, effective communication, and effective policy formation are reinforced and extended in the policy analysis course and senior design sequence, where students are required to consider and articulate the public policy implications of complex technological projects     

Publishing in Scientific and Engineering Contexts: A Course for Graduate Students Tutorial

Based on feedback from graduate students, from science and engineering faculty who teach graduate students, and from surveys about the skills graduate students need, the authors have designed and taught a graduate-level course in academic publishing. This article describes the need for the course and the theory behind its design, outlines the course content, and presents assessment data from the first three course iterations. The findings indicate that this course has increased students' awareness of the role of rhetorical and discourse knowledge as well as their level of confidence in their ability to write and publish professional work. Further, findings from interviews with faculty advisors yield insight into the benefits of the course for students, advisors, disciplinary programs, and cross-curricular initiatives     

Engineering Entrepreneurship: does entrepreneurship have a role in engineering education?

Many engineering programs have recently added courses and material on "engineering entrepreneurship". These programs represent a diverse understanding of what engineering students should receive in the way of instruction in the area of entrepreneurship. This paper examines various definitions of engineering entrepreneurship, and also examines the pedagogical justification for including entrepreneurship in engineering education. The authors use as a context the engineering programs at The University of Texas at Austin, particularly the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The paper examines educational objectives and criteria discussed in documents produced by the National Science Foundation, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering International, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, and other sources, to develop one approach for entrepreneurship education.     

Biomedical Engineering Education: Enrollment, Courses, Degrees, and Employment

During the 1979-1980 academic year a two-page questionnaire on biomedical engineering education was sent to 251 engineering schools. 71 schools indicated that they had degree programs and an additional 35 indicated that they had official minor or option programs, 107 did not have a program, and 38 did not respond. For schools offering degrees in biomedical engineering, there were 2859 students enrolled in 37 B.S. programs, 830 students in 48 M.S. programs, and 469 students in 41 Ph.D. programs. Options or minors in biomedical engineering with a degree in another engineering discipline were available at the B.S. level at 41 schools, at the M.S. level at 42 schools, and at the Ph.D. level at 34 schools. Over the past two years, schools offered 109 courses in biomedical instrumentation, 74 in computers in medicine, 162 in physiological systems/modeling, 60 in biomechanics, 47 in biomaterials, 33 in hospital internship, 23 in clinical engineering, 9 in biomedical engineering lab, and 67 in other areas. During the academic year 1978-1979, schools awarded 464 B.S. degrees, 249 M.S. degrees, and 107 Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering. Of these graduates, 253 found jobs in industry, 23 in government, 35 in academia, and 66 in hospitals or clinics; 100 went to medical school, 96 to biomedical engineering graduate schools, and 57 to other graduate or professional schools.     

Establishing academic programs in integrated media systems

For four years, we have been developing a wide range of graduate and undergraduate degree programs related to integrated media systems on behalf of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), for the School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). The IMSC is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) that became operational in 1996. It is not an academic department; however, one of its important missions is education. Most of the developed degree programs have been for engineering students, but one is available to all students. These degree programs are administered either by an academic department (e.g., computer science) or by an assistant dean of the School of Engineering. The purpose of this article is to not only describe these degree programs, but to also provide some lessons that have been learned along the way, lessons that may help expedite the development of similar programs at other universities     

麻省理工学院教育教学考察报告--基本情况篇

本文是笔者于2003年秋季学期赴美国麻省理工学院进行教育教学考察报告的第一部分。首先介绍了麻省理工学院的历史沿革、地理环境、院系组成、教师队伍、学生比例、有特色的学生培养计划,然后讨论了工学院的基本情况,最后简单介绍了电气工程与计算机科学系的历史、现状和教学情况。     

A Model of 60 GHz Indoor Radio Channel

A novel model of millimeter-wave (MMW) indoor radio channel is presented in this paper. The model is related the random properties of the MMW radio channel to the underlying geometry of the environment. The geometric simplicity of the MMW channel is allowed examining fundamental deterministic properties of the wave propagation behavior in environments of predefined randomness. The dimensions and properties of environments are described by various probability distributions. Stochastic influence on the radio channel is studied for the down-link of a wireless local area network at 60 GHz. Other related factors, such as amplitudes of path lengths, angles of departure, and amplitudes, as well as spatial power densities, average power of the direct paths are investigated.     

毫米波宽带综合化信道技术研究进展与展望

根据现代毫米波频段军民用电子信息系统并行多功能、全频带、集成化发展趋势,提出了毫米波综合化信道技术发展需求。综述了国内外宽带综合化信道架构和关键技术研究进展,提出了基于可配置宽带毫米波前端的信道架构、全信道单片集成、超导技术、宽带线性固态功放等毫米波综合化信道技术发展方向,给出了开展毫米波宽带综合化信道技术研究的建议。     

The internationalization of engineering education: a tale of two countries

Two international exchange programs in engineering between universities in Japan and Canada, are described in order to explain the significant benefits gained by the undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the academic staff who participate, and to highlight key principles generally followed in the design and execution of exchange programs. One notable and successful engineering exchange program is between the University of Waterloo, located in Southern Ontario, Canada, and Tottori University in Japan, while the other is between the University of Waterloo and Kyoto University in Japan. Both of these programs include foreign students taking courses for credit or audit at the host university, and, for the case of graduate students, also receiving guidance in their research. Moreover, upon completion of one academic semester in Japan, all of the undergraduate Waterloo students studying at Tottori University are employed in Japanese industry for three to four months before returning to Canada. Of paramount importance to the education of the participating undergraduate and graduate students is the opportunity to learn, by first-hand experience, the language and culture of a foreign country. In fact, one of the key findings of a survey completed by Canadian and Japanese students who took part in the exchange programs, is that living in a different culture greatly enhanced their own personal development. The addition of this international perspective to a solid education in engineering opens many doors of opportunity for exchange program alumni, who are well prepared to fully participate in the global marketplace of the 21st century, and to assist society in responsibly reaching an equitable and sustainable future.