Bridge Engineering for the Elementary Grades

A one hour presentation was developed to get elementary school students interested in engineering. The presentation begins with the students building a six feet long, structurally sound bridge which they can crawl across. A pictorial presentation helps them learn to identify some of the different types of bridges: truss, stone arch, steel arch, concrete girder, cable-stayed, and suspension. They are introduced to the fundamental engineering concepts of tension and compression. These concepts are reinforced by demonstrating that if a tension member is replaced with a chain then the bridge is still strong, but if a compression member is replaced with a chain the bridge will collapse. The presentation was integrated into the engineering curriculum by having senior design groups develop new bridge concepts and introduce new ideas into the presentation. This project provides a good senior design problem and helps keep the program fresh and interesting for the grade school children.     

Applied Aerodynamics Experience for Secondary Science Teachers and Students

The Department of Aerospace Engineering, Mechanics & Engineering Science at the University of Florida in conjunction with the School Board of Alachua County, Florida has embarked on a four-year project of university-secondary school collaboration designed to enhance mathematics and science instruction in secondary school classrooms. The goals are to provide teachers with a fundamental knowledge of flight sciences as well as stimulate interest among students, particularly women and minorities, toward careers in engineering, mathematics, and science. In the first year, all thirteen of the county's eighth grade physical science teachers and their 1200 students participated. The activities included a three-day college level seminar for the teachers, several weeks of classroom instruction for all the students, and an airport field trip for a subgroup of about 400 students that included an orientation flight in a Cessna 172 aircraft. The project brought together large numbers of middle school students, teachers, undergraduate and graduate engineering students, school administrators, and university engineering faculty. In Year 2, we are expanding our coverage and improving our minority outreach by offering the program to additional counties and the Florida Comprehensive State Center for Minorities. We are also introducing a program to recruit undergraduate minority engineering students for teaching careers by teaming these students with middle school teacher “mentors”, and having them work with teachers in the classroom.     

Outreach program to teach safe medicine use to middle school children

Medicine use isn't a typical part of the curriculum for middle school students. But a new educational outreach program is changing that.     

A Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory Course

The Colorado School of Mines (CSM) curriculum was recently modified by replacing laboratory courses in electrical circuits, fluid mechanics and stress analysis with a sequence of Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory courses (MEL I, II, and III). The MEL sequence prepares students for their professional careers by integrating discipline-specific components into systems and building subject-matter depth through a vertical sequence. The experiments move beyond basic theory verification by requiring students to practice higher level thinking. In addition, the systems experiments encourage students to reorganize knowledge and discover the connections among concepts in several courses. The MEL sequence helps students understand relationships among science, engineering science, and engineering design. The MEL experiments develop life-long learning skills by encouraging higher levels of thinking on the Perry scale and requiring students to use a variety of Kolb's learning styles. This paper describes the educational objectives and experiments for the MEL I course. The paper gives assessment results for MEL I and compares it with traditional laboratories.     

A formative evaluation of a Southeast High School Integrative science,technology, engineering,and mathematics (STEM) academy

A study was conducted to investigate to what extent an integrative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education program had an impact to high school students in a South East region of the United States of America (US). The program was a brainchild of three teachers in physics, mathematics, and engineering and technology who teamed up to offer an integrative STEM program within their high schools' STEM Academy. The teachers structured their curriculum content in themes of same topics studied in theory (Physics) and practice (Engineering and Technology) using timely Mathematical tools. A cohort of students within the STEM academy signed to participate. This paper presents findings of the student cohort participation through a trilogy lens, and teacher reflections. Twenty students participated in this study. The mean scores for the trilogy levels of engagement for STEM disciplines and STEM careers ranged from 4.10 to 6.21 on a seven-point scale indicating high levels of engagement. Capacity mean scores were 4.30 on Information and 4.35 on Knowledge and for the group. In this category White students had the highest mean scores in both Knowledge and Information. Further, female students were higher on Knowledge. The mean scores ranged from 2.50 to 4.00 on a five-point scale for continuity.     

Writing Across the Chemical Engineering Curriculum at the University of North Dakota

In order to prepare engineering graduates with the written and oral communication skills needed in their professional careers a coordinated writing across the curriculum (WAC) program has developed in the chemical engineering department at the University of North Dakota. The students practice and develop their skills with writing assignments in both lecture and laboratory courses from the first-year level through the fourth-year capstone design course. The coordinated approach, especially in the four-semester laboratory sequence, allows the students to develop their skills by building on communication experiences in previous courses. The WAC program at UND including writing and public speaking assignments is described.     

The Engage Program: Implementing and Assessing a New First Year Experience at the University of Tennessee

The Engage initiative at the University of Tennessee addresses the needs of entering engineering students through a new first year curriculum. The program integrates the engineering subject matter of the freshman year, teaches problem solving and design by application, and seeks to address the increased retention and graduation of engineering students. Noteworthy curriculum features of the Engage program include a hands‐on laboratory where students do physical homework to practice the concepts introduced in lectures, placing all freshman engineering students in a year‐long team design curriculum, and a team training course where engineering upperclassmen are trained in team facilitation techniques and placed as facilitators with the freshman design teams. The Engage program was piloted during the 1997–98 academic year with 60 students. In 1998–99, the program was scaled up to 150 students, and fully implemented with the entire freshman class of 465 students during the 1999–2000 academic year. Engage students have shown a significant increase in academic performance compared to students following a more traditional curriculum. Graduation statistics show the positive long‐term results of this effort.     

Characterizing Design Learning: A Mixed‐Methods Study of Engineering Designers' Use of Language

Using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods to examine engineering design learning, we found that students taking a course in engineering design and/or studying engineering for four years acquired engineering design language that is common to a larger community of practice as well as common to their own programs and institutions of higher learning. The study also suggests that engineering design language shapes the knowledge that students have about engineering design. Finally, students did not always put their design knowledge into practice, suggesting the need for educational improvements and research to bridge this gap.     

Systematic Design of a First-Year Mechanical Engineering Course at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University offers a first-year course titled Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering to introduce undergraduate students to the discipline of mechanical engineering. The goals of the course are to excite students about the field of mechanical engineering early in their careers, introduce basic mechanical engineering concepts in an integrated way, provide a link to the basic physics and mathematics courses, and present design and problem-solving skills as central engineering activities. These goals are met through a combination of real-world engineering examples, classroom demonstrations, and hands-on experience in assignments and laboratories. Over the eleven semesters that this course has been taught, teams of first-year students have designed and assembled energy conversion mechanisms using miniature steam engines and Meccano sets to drive a mobile vehicle or to generate electricity for lighting a bulb. This paper describes the systematic process used to design this course and emphasizes this process of carefully integrating lectures with classroom demonstrations, laboratory experiments and hands-on projects to encourage students' active learning.     

A Learning Experience: The Technology Innovation Program

The Technology Innovation Program (TIP) is a cooperative educational venture between the Department of Chemical Engineering and the School of Business at Queen's University at Kingston, Canada. First incorporated into the curriculum of senior year business and chemical engineering students in the 1994–1995 school year, TIP provides an invaluable opportunity for these students to work together in multi-disciplinary teams on real projects for industry clients. An academically rigorous exercise, TIP uses non-traditional instructional means such as problem-based learning, multi-disciplinary teams, and self-directed project work to create a learning environment paralleling that of the professional engineer or business person. Although it is still evolving, the Technology Innovation Program provides a model for other educational ventures seeking to bridge engineering and business, and to establish valuable links between the university and industry, while simultaneously easing the graduating student's transition into the workplace.     

Educating Engineering Professors in Education

Engineering graduates with Ph.D. degrees need to know how to teach for both academic and industrial careers. Ideally, education in pedagogy will occur during graduate school. Research has an appropriate role in universities, but we need to ensure that all engineering professors are “good enough” teachers. Students can learn how to teach through TA training, a course in educational methods in engineering, supervised internships, and a combination of these methods. An action plan to improve teaching is presented.     

SpaceStation©—Computer Simulation Tool Demonstrating Biological Systems

A computer-based SpaceStation© simulation program written to introduce first-year college students to concepts in biological systems engineering was tested in two freshman engineering courses. The program modeled the interactions among a human crew, fish, microbes, and plants in a closed environment with fixed amounts of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water. Students were asked to rebalance the system after a significant percentage of the crew left or entered the station. The experience gained through working with the simulation helped the students discuss interactions within the system. The simulation and related discussion about the project were well-received by students. Presentations made by the students demonstrated creative involvement, awareness of interactions in biological systems, and increased awareness of the profession. The simulation developed only introductory levels of design skill in the students.     

Choosing creativity: the role of individual risk and ambiguity aversion on creative concept selection in engineering design

While creativity is often seen as an indispensable quality of engineering design, individuals often select conventional or previously successful options during the concept selection process due to the inherent risk associated with creative concepts and their inadvertent bias against creativity. However, little is actually known about what factors attribute to the promotion or filtering of these creative concepts during concept selection. To address this knowledge gap, an exploratory study was conducted with 38 undergraduate engineering students. This study was aimed at investigating the impact of individual risk aversion, ambiguity aversion, and student educational level on the selection and filtering of creative ideas during the concept selection process. The results from this study indicate that individuals’ ability to generate creative ideas is not significantly related to their preference for creative ideas during concept selection, but individual risk aversion and ambiguity aversion are significantly related to both creative concept selection and creative idea generation. Our results also revealed that first- and third-year students’ creative ability is affected differently by varying levels of tolerance for ambiguity. These results highlight the need for a more directed focus on creativity in engineering education in both concept creation and concept selection. These results also add to our understanding of creativity during concept selection and provide guidelines for enhancing the design process.     

A K‐12/University Partnership: Creating Tomorrow's Engineers*

Supported by the National Science Foundation, the GK‐12 Fellows program at the University of Colorado at Boulder explores innovative ways for engineering graduate students to use engineering as the vehicle to provide K‐12 classroom instruction and hands‐on experiences that integrate physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology. Engineering “Fellows” fill a crucial gap in the two‐way exchange of content and pedagogy between the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the K‐12 community of learners. The active presence of real world, engineering role models in K‐12 classrooms improves the quality of math and science content, and introduces engineering to teachers and young students as a potential career path. Working through the University's graduate program legitimizes K‐12 outreach as a valid, and satisfying, academic endeavor for graduate students.     

Assessing K‐12 Pre‐Engineering Outreach Programs*

Motivated by a desire to excite K‐12 students about the joys of engineering and spark their interest in pre‐engineering subjects, the Integrated Teaching and Learning (ITL) Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder has developed a pre‐engineering outreach program targeted at K‐12 teachers and students. To supplement anecdotal success indicators, ITL developed several assessment tools to measure the impact of these programs. Assessment strategies consist of three key components: 1) assessment of workshop participant feedback (teachers and students), 2) assessment of long‐term outcomes (teachers), and 3) assessment tools developed for the teachers' classroom use (i.e., embedded assessment). This paper reviews the process used to develop the assessment plans and tools. Examples of the tools used to assess participant feedback and preliminary outcomes are provided. Additionally, the process used to develop embedded assessment tools is described, including development of performance criteria and assessment tools that are linked to the learning goals, objectives, and K‐12 State educational standards.     

Fundamentals Of Engineering Energy

Three new Fundamentals of Engineering courses, entitled Energy, Materials and Systems are presented in the sophomore year of the Drexel University E⁴ program. The first focuses on the concept, manifestations, uses, conservation, storage, transformation, and transfer of energy. The second focuses on materials to establish, interpret and utilize the relationships that exist between processing/synthesis, microstructure, properties, and performance-for metals, ceramics, polymers and composites. The third focuses on systems, capitalizing on the up-front-engineering theme of the E⁴ curriculum and the extensive use of computer methods to equip students with concepts and methods of analysis which are common to all branches of engineering. All courses integrate mathematics, science, and engineering as a central theme. The subject matter builds upon the freshman courses to prepare a common strong foundation in the fundamentals of engineering for all students regardless of major. Faculty from science and engineering collaborate in preparing and presenting these courses. This interdisciplinary communication, frequently lacking in the traditional program, is an important feature of the E⁴ program. Student performance in these and upper-division courses indicates that the educational objectives are being achieved. Surveys of student opinions show a high degree of interest in the subject matter and satisfaction with the methodologies adopted.     

An Engineering Major Does Not (Necessarily) an Engineer Make: Career Decision Making Among Undergraduate Engineering Majors

This study uses a mixed‐methods design to investigate students' career decision making at two U.S. undergraduate institutions. The research question was, “To what extent do students who complete undergraduate programs in engineering intend to pursue engineering careers?” We surveyed senior engineering majors about their post‐graduate intentions, and later interviewed a subset of the seniors about their career intentions. Only 42 percent of students surveyed reported that they definitely intended to pursue a career in engineering, 44 percent were unsure, and 14 percent were definitely not pursuing engineering. We observed significant institutional differences. Interview data reveal the quixotic nature of many students' decisions about their careers; strikingly, students were vacillating between multiple post‐graduate options late into the senior year, even into summer. Implications are discussed for further research and ways engineering departments can influence students' career decisions.     

Engineering Design in Industry: Teaching Students and Faculty to Apply Engineering Science in Design

In a typical engineering curriculum students and faculty rarely have the opportunity to take a real problem, extract its essence, apply an analysis, and then make design decisions based on this analysis. This extractive link between fundamentals and design is particularly critical to a smooth transition from engineering study at the university to engineering practice in industry. Historically, universities have taken the responsibility for rigorous theoretical and technical training in subjects that include the basic sciences and fundamentals of engineering, while industry has been responsible for making engineering graduates contributors to specific tasks important to the company and its core competency. In this division of training, however, no one teaches students how to apply fundamental engineering principles to practical problems. To make matters worse, faculty often ignore engineering relevance of basic theory and the students then reject these fundamentals; in both cases engineering performance suffers. One solution to this missing bridge is being developed in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the form of the “Engineering Design in Industry” program.     

Incidental Writing in the Engineering Classroom

Currently, most of the writing that students do in engineering classes is formal writing, such as laboratory or design reports, produced at the end of the design process. Although appropriate for communicating the results of this process, formal writing tends to be less effective at helping students master the design concepts presented in the class. A potentially more beneficial form of writing is “incidental writing,” informal writing that students do throughout the course of the design process. Students enrolled in an engineering class developed under an NSF-funded program at the University of Washington kept journals throughout the class. Analysis of the journals indicated that incidental writing enables students to communicate with instructors, and improves not only the students' writing skills and comprehension of class material, but also their problem-solving abilities and ability to monitor their thinking and learning strategies.