Innovative First Year Aerospace Design Course at MIT

Students at MIT typically take major‐specific courses beginning with their second year of studies. For the first year students eager to begin their aerospace education and to help those students unsure about selecting aerospace engineering as their major field, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics offers an elective course, Introduction to Aerospace and Design. The course makes use of the new opportunities offered by the World Wide Web and provides students a real engineering experience through the hands‐on, Lighter‐Than‐Air (LTA) vehicle design project. The course teaches the basic concepts of aeronautics, includes lectures on design, and gives an overview of astronautics. The flexibility inherent in the World Wide Web allows us to accommodate the needs of students who require a review of the fundamentals in addition to in‐ class lecture material and the needs of others who desire to learn advanced material beyond what is presented in lecture. A Web‐based Discussion Forum greatly facilitated interaction among students, resulting in better vehicle designs and a friendlier classroom environment. The course culminates in an LTA vehicle design competition in which teams of five to six students design and build radio‐controlled blimps measuring up to 5 meters in length. The vehicles are flown around the perimeter of a basketball court with the objective of carrying a maximum amount of payload in a minimum amount of time. The students are introduced to real‐world engineering practice through oral presentations of their preliminary designs and critical designs in front of a faculty jury. Towards the end of the course, the students are required to submit a design portfolio showing how their LTA vehicles took shape via their individual and team efforts. The students are permitted to examine previous designs and improve upon them, yielding better vehicles every year. Results from a survey indicated that the freshmen felt much more comfortable working on technical problems with no clear answers as well as designing and building a device from an assortment of given parts.     

ECSEL/MIT Engineering Education Workshop '99: A Report with Recommendations

In May, 1999, the NSF funded, Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership, (ECSEL) sponsored a workshop at MIT to: (i) describe and disseminate the principal results of the coalition's efforts over the past decade, (ii) bring together faculty, department chairs and deans from a wide variety of engineering schools to explore how the most significant barriers to reform of engineering education might be overcome, and (iii) to promote the development of effective policies for the future. Panel sessions and roundtables addressed many of the critical issues facing faculty and administrators seeking to renovate undergraduate engineering education. A wide range of experiences were described and proposals advanced. The authors summarize these discussions and put forward a set of recommendations founded upon the essential points made over the course of the two‐day workshop.     

Senior/Sophomore Co-Class Instruction: Teaching Interpersonal Management Skills in Engineering

As society becomes increasingly technology-oriented, there is a growing demand for engineers and scientists to take a greater role in decision-making processes. The future success of our engineering graduates will increasingly depend on not only solid training in scientific and engineering principles, but also a more rigorous education in interpersonal management skills (IPMS). Co-class instruction of sophomore and senior engineering students provides an efficient educational structure to incorporate IPMS education into an existing engineering curriculum. Co-class instruction provides opportunities for senior students to experience direct subordinate supervisory technical management, develop project management skills, formally evaluate personnel performance and improve faculty/student contact. Younger students gain opportunities to see how their engineering education is applied and gives them an opportunity to network with graduating students. Co-class instruction did not significantly increase instructor workload, but does require that one instructor teach both sophomore and senior classes concurrently. Given the similarity in engineering curriculum structure, this method should be easily applicable to a wide range of engineering disciplines. Results indicate that students are highly receptive to co-class instruction, with excellent feedback.     

Reflective Analysis of Student Learning in a Sophomore Engineering Course

Student learning in a specific sophomore engineering course was analyzed using a variety of learning theory explanations. Bimodal grade distributions were observed in most of the examinations. The following theories were applied to these results: knowledge structure, Piaget's concrete and formal operational stages, Myers-Briggs intuitive versus sensing, Perry's model of college student development, and deep versus shallow approaches to learning. The deep versus shallow approach to learning theory appears to best explain the results. Problem solving approaches are reviewed in light of the results obtained. Suggestions for improving the course are made, and compared to the results obtained when the course was re-taught. This analysis serves as both an example of application of learning theories and as a review of these theories.     

Improving First‐Year Engineering Education*

In September of 1998, the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD) piloted an innovative, integrated, first‐year curriculum. It dramatically changed 31 credits across two semesters. The program was modeled after several previous successful undergraduate experiments at other universities such as those in the NSF Foundation Coalition and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The new program at UMD included This paper describes the new curriculum, some of the practical considerations in its design, and the way it has functioned. Significant improvements demonstrated after one year of operation include

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Quality Planning in Engineering Education: Analysis of Alternative Implementations of a New First‐Year Curriculum at Texas A&M University

In general terms, traditional strategic planning may be described as a mechanism for generating a set of targets and approaches for achieving the established purpose of an organization. For it to be effective, a strategic plan must serve as the basis for creating a set of well‐defined operations that align with the organizational goals and strategies. Because the task of generating an effective plan requires knowledge, time, patience, and persistence, not all organizations are prepared to devote the time and energy that is required to produce a meaningful plan. It is the intent of this paper to describe an approach to quality planning which was used to make major curricular changes in the first‐year engineering education program at Texas A&M University. The planners' intention in this instance was to apply quality function deployment matrices, systems engineering concepts, quality management principles, and multi‐attribute utility analysis to the evaluation of curriculum alternatives in an effort to make the planning process less complex and more systematic.     

Bioinformatics: A New Field in Engineering Education

Bioinformatics is a new engineering field poorly served by traditional curricula. Bioinformatics concerns the use of computer and statistical methods to understand biological data, such as the voluminous data produced by high‐throughput biological experimentation. As the demand has outpaced the supply of bioinformaticians, the University of California, Santa Cruz, School of Engineering is establishing undergraduate and graduate degrees in bioinformatics. In this paper we explore the blend of mathematics, engineering, science, and bioinformatics topics and courses needed for an undergraduate degree in this new field.     

Engineering Entrepreneurship: An Example of A Paradigm Shift in Engineering Education

This paper describes a course on technology‐based entrepreneurship. Brown University's Division of Engineering has created a two‐semester course sequence designed to introduce students to entrepreneurship through a unique merger of classroom learning and industry participation. The course is open to advanced undergraduates from all engineering disciplines, and emphasis is placed upon recruiting almost half of the student participants from outside of engineering in order to develop “team building” skills. Local “parent companies” provide seed ideas or concepts to student groups who use skills learned in the classroom (both in this course as well as other courses) to develop and refine the parent company's idea and turn it into a viable simulated spin‐off business or new start‐up. Managers from the parent companies serve in an evolving role over the two‐semester sequence beginning as a “board of directors” for the spin‐off and eventually evolving into a potential source of start‐up capital (or possibly a customer for the products of the company). The faculty carefully manage the student‐company interface. Deliverables at the end of the two‐semester sequence include a business plan and a prototype product.     

Considering Context: A Study of First‐Year Engineering Students

High‐quality engineering design requires an understanding of how the resulting engineered artifact interacts with society, the natural environment, and other aspects of context. This study examines how first‐year engineering undergraduates approached two engineering design tasks. We focused on how much students considered contextual factors during problem‐scoping, a critical part of the design process. As part of a larger, longitudinal study, we collected data from 160 students at four U.S. institutions. Students varied in their consideration of each design task's context, and women's responses were more likely to be context‐oriented than men's. Overall, context‐orientation was positively correlated between the two design tasks, despite differences in data collection and analysis. Having found that beginning engineering students, particularly women, are sensitive to important contextual factors, we suggest that efforts to broaden participation in engineering should consider legitimizing and fostering context‐oriented approaches to engineering earlier in the curriculum.     

Manufacturing: A Strategic Opportunity for Engineering Education

This paper examines the importance of the manufacturing enterprise and the need for manufacturing education. The objective is to present a case for the expansion of manufacturing‐related education as a strategic opportunity for engineering education. A brief history of engineering education is presented, as well as an exploration of the current ABET criteria for various engineering disciplines. Approaches for achieving manufacturing‐related education are presented noting that Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering are often most closely associated with manufacturing. Surveys of industry reveal the need for manufacturing education and identify preferred approaches. If manufacturing is to be included as part of a mechanical engineering program, there are a number of possible approaches. Of all the new technologies that will impact engineering education, none is larger than the Internet. The number of manufacturing educational programs in the United States is growing substantially. New manufacturing programs are encouraged along with review of educational content in traditional engineering disciplines‐especially the related discipline of mechanical engineering. Analysis leads us to believe that manufacturing represents a strategic direction and opportunity for engineering education to pursue.     

Integrating Communication and Engineering Education: A Look at Curricula,Courses, and Support Systems

In this article we point to the ways in which engineering and communication disciplines can work together to ensure the ABET criterion that encompasses effective communication is represented in engineering curricula. Drawing upon examples from several universities in North America, we offer useful portraits of writing across the curriculum approaches, interdisciplinary courses, integrated programs, and a variety of support systems including writing and communication centers and online resources. As we develop increased awareness of the importance of including communication instruction in engineering curricula, the variety of possibilities presented in this article can help us integrate communication and engineering education.     

Improving Engineering Education: A Research-Based Framework For Teaching

Instructional methods suggested to improve engineering education often follow primarily from personal experience and disparate research findings. While acknowledging the value of anecdotal evidence and individual studies, we advocate treating teaching as an ongoing scholarly practice where existing and new research is organized into a robust framework that produces a total effect greater than the sum of the independent parts. This paper describes the major components in a research-based framework for teaching and applies it to engineering education. While initially time intensive, this approach promotes an interplay of pedagogical decisions resulting in a synergism that best advances effective engineering education.     

Excellence in Engineering Education: Views of Undergraduate Engineering Students

The purpose of this study was to understand the views and perceptions of engineering undergraduate students on engineering education. The method of content analysis was used to analyze the language used by engineering undergraduate students, and to extract the underlying common factors or perceived characteristics of “Excellence in Engineering Education.” These common factors were then used to identify and compare the similarities and differences in views between engineering students and perspectives from three types of stakeholders in the field. Forty‐seven undergraduate engineering students (17 females and 30 males) participated voluntarily in this study to answer four individual questions and ten group questions. The results showed that students strongly emphasized the importance of their own roles in the educational system and the value of instructional technology and real work examples in enhancing the quality of engineering education. The implications of the research results on excellence in engineering education are discussed.     

Assessing General Creativity and Creative Engineering Design in First Year Engineering Students

Creativity is a vital tool for innovation in engineering. Psychology and engineering faculty developed the Creative Engineering Design Assessment (CEDA) because existing tools are limited. This measure was administered with general creativity measures in 63 engineering (57 males, six females) and 21 non‐engineering (six males, 15 females) students in five week intervals. Inter‐rater reliability showed high consistency overall and between the test and retest administrations. Only engineering males and females significantly differed on the retest. Engineering students with low, medium, and high creative engineering design did not statistically differ in their general creativity, not domain specific to engineering; however, only high scorers were significantly higher on the retest from the other groups. Future research is needed with larger samples.