Practicing engineering in a freshman introductory course

This paper discusses a teaching experience obtained in the undergraduate course of Control Engineering at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. The course endeavors to introduce the students to the university and to the real world of engineering and to develop an understanding of basic engineering concepts and foster professional skills. By introducing practicing engineering to the course from day one, student motivation is increased, and the relationship between theoretical and practical aspects of engineering is demonstrated more clearly. This "hands-on approach" allows the student a greater insight into the life of an engineer. It strengthens a weakness found in established teaching methods, allowing the individual to embark on his or her engineering education with greater confidence in his or her ability as an engineer.     

Curriculum development in microelectromechanical systems inmechanical engineering

Curriculum development in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) Department at the University of Michigan is presented. A course curriculum structure that integrates both mechanical and electrical engineering courses is proposed for mechanical engineering students. The proposed curriculum starts from undergraduate study and finishes at the Ph.D. level. Two new graduate-level MEMS courses are proposed: “Introduction to MEMS” for senior undergraduate students and entry-level graduate students and “Advanced MEMS” for graduate students. The first course has been experimentally taught at the University of Michigan for three years and the class assessments are summarized and analyzed in this paper. It is clear from the student responses that they are interested in taking courses in emerging technologies such as MEMS and more courses in the MEMS area should be offered. Future MEMS curriculum development and a new MEMS course for undergraduate-level students in the college of engineering are discussed     

Motivating Engineering Freshmen through an Authentic Design Experience

As an integral part of the required course "Introduction to Engineering," every freshman engineer at Arizona State University is involved in a realistic design project. The object is to give the student a clear idea of the role of the engineer, the challenges he faces, and the skills he must acquire. In this project, each student works as a member of an "engineering firm" which develops a new design that is based on one of a number of ideas originally generated by the students themselves. This paper describes how this design competition is organized. This design experience, running through the entire semester, is paralleled by weekly lectures by prominent engineers from industry, as well as by formal conventional instruction in the elements of engineering analysis and computation.     

Women in Engineering?1 Percent to 10 Percent in Four Years

Special programs which lead high school girls to the college registration lines for freshmen engineering students are very new to most universities. Women enrollments of up to 10% of the engineering student body is equally a new experience. The College of Engineering at the University of North Dakota has conducted summer programs for high school girls for the last four years. The effort to attract, retain, and graduate women engineers seems to be successfully established. Thirty percent of the participants in the summer programs have enrolled in engineering at UND and 85% of those are continuing their study. Fifty percent of the total female engineering students are institute participants; the other 50% enrolled directly into the college or transferred from other disciplines and other schools. Regardless of their origin, women engineering students are talented and well prepared as their average composite ACT score of about 27 indicates. The special effort by staff and students has increased the enrollment of women in engineering by a factor of 10 since 1971.     

Changing student attitudes, perceptions, and awareness

Senior design capstone courses provide an excellent opportunity for biomedical engineering design instructors to help students begin to look at the "real world" differently. Depending upon the structure of a particular institution's senior design course and the resulting design experience obtained, students' attitudes and perceptions related to biomedical engineering design, the product development process, and the engineering profession can be positively affected. Therefore, senior design experience provides gateways for course instructors to transform the way students think about the design process, teamwork, expected job performance, and the engineering profession. The resulting changes in attitudes, perceptions, and awareness can play an important role in preparing students for careers in biomedical engineering.     

A student-enacted simulation approach to software engineering education

In some cases, real-world application of software engineering concepts does not effectively map with current undergraduate curriculums. Typically, a student's first "hands-on" experience working on large-scale software development projects is via an intern position or his/her first full-time position. However, prior exposure to the corporate project environment would greatly improve a student's performance in industry. In order to develop students for successful careers in software engineering, specifically for software development, they must be immersed not only in the software development lifecycle and paradigms, but also in the workings of large project teams. Currently, most undergraduate software engineering courses are taught by presenting the concepts and methodologies and assigning fragmented three-to-four person group projects. In the Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, a two-course approach to undergraduate software engineering education has been developed that incorporates the practical application of coursework in a large team setting. The first course presents a firm software design basis, while the second course demonstrates corporate-level software engineering concepts with a semester-long software development simulation where the entire class is the development team. This paper presents the experiences from offering this software engineering simulation approach.     

A Course in Creative Problem Solving

This paper briefly describes a three credit-hour undergraduate senior-level course, Creative Problem Solving, which has been taught for four years in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida. Particular emphasis is placed on the techniques found successful for teaching a course in engineering creativity, since knowledge of such techniques has constituted a deterrent to many desiring to teach such a course. The purposes and typical examples of classroom and outside activities are presented. The activities deliberately contain strong student participation both individually and in small groups. The course described seeks to impart to students a workable approach to the technique of solving complex engineering problems. It simultaneously orients and develops the students' attitudes toward recognition of the role played by creativity in actual engineering problem solving. Though the present course is oriented toward electrical engineers, it is believed that the essential methodology used could, with some modifications, be adapted to other undergraduate engineering disciplines. An attempt is made to appraise the effectiveness of the overall course. Some of the unsolved teaching problems are also exposed.     

RFID Student Educational Experiences at the UNT College of Engineering: A Sequential Approach to Creating a Project-Based RFID Course

This paper describes radio frequency identification (RFID) projects, designed and implemented by students in the College of Engineering at the University of North Texas, as part of their senior-design project requirement. The paper also describes an RFID-based project implemented at Rice Middle School in Plano, TX, which went on to win multiple prizes both at the school and regional level. The goal of the RFID endeavor is to develop an RFID elective course that is current, industry-oriented, and methodically built to enable faculty to design, develop, and deliver the course to a diverse group of engineering students. The sequence of events through which the course evolved was as follows: conduct an industry-supported workshop for students in the College of Engineering with funding received from the National Science Foundation (NSF);      

Co-Operative Engineering Education?A Means for Meeting a National Need to Increase the Number of Black Engineering Graduates

This paper outlines a co-operative engineering curriculum involving a "pre-co-op work/experience" immediately following graduation from high school. The University of Tennessee has found this an effective means of attracting and motivating more minority students to study engineering. The paper outlines the program including a typical work/study schedule and includes comments of participants about their experiences in the program.     

An engineering practices course

A so-called capstone design course at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) that maximizes engineering practices is described. The central design project is essentially used as a vehicle for the presentation and experience of engineering practices. To the extent possible, the students are afforded a real-life industry experience. They work in teams, select and propose their systems/projects, specify their systems, plan their projects in depth, design and test their systems, document and orally present their project, and demonstrate their systems. Where appropriate, practices lecture topics are synchronized with the project requirement, providing student preparation and reinforcement. Although the course is part of the Computer Science Engineering program (continuously ABET accredited since 1983), the format and most of the specifics can be applied to any engineering discipline     

A capstone design course [electrical engineering]

A capstone electrical engineering design course has been developed at the University of San Diego with the goal of providing students with the opportunity to: study design alternatives and select a design responsive to a request for proposal; sell the design concept to a panel of independent evaluators with a written proposal and oral presentations; obtain experience in design within a cooperating group; and completely fabricate and document a working electronic system. While innovation is not overtly discouraged, emphasis is placed upon satisfactory completion of a working product with the time constraints of a two semester course which spans one summer. The course is intended not only to provide a meaningful design experience but also to accomplish a confidence-building transition to the role of practicing engineer     

Development of a 16-bit microprogrammable computer as a seniorcourse project: a teamwork approach to engineering education

The authors describe an educational experiment in computer engineering at the University of Washington. Eight senior students work together to design and fabricate a 16-bit general-purpose microprogrammable computer system and support software. The project was developed in a capstone hardware design course in electrical engineering. In parallel with other demands of the course, students collaborated on such tasks as architectural specification and research, design and wirewrapping, and testing of the system     

Enhancing the freshman and sophomore ECE student experience using a platform for learning/spl trade/

Outcomes based assessment has shown that introducing a platform for learning/spl trade/ based on a robot referred to as TekBots/spl trade/ into the first two electrical and computer engineering (ECE) courses enhances students' sense of community, innovation capabilities, and troubleshooting skills. At Oregon State University, Corvallis, ECE students enhance their fundamental understanding of ECE concepts as they construct and build upon their individual robot (TekBots). They experience first-hand the fun associated with engineering while gaining a sense of accomplishment. This platform will eventually extend through the four-year curriculum so that, rather than a single point project, the robot serves as a platform that connects and integrates the content from course to course.     

Microcomputers for Data Acquisition, Control, and Automation?A Laboratory Course for Preengineering Students

A general engineering laboratory course featuring microcomputer interfacing for data acquisition, control, and automation is described. This course, available to all junior engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was developed and run for 220 students in the Spring semester of 1984. The goals of the course were to: 1) provide experience in engineering problem solving and design; 2) teach and provide "hands-on" experience in the fundamentals of data acquisition and control using microcomputers; and 3) illustrate significant physical principles and engineering processes. The course included a short series of lectures on the fundamentals of microprocessors and the underlying theory of data acquisition (including sampling theory, signal conditioning, and analog-to-digital conversion). An extensive laboratory manual was developed to serve as the primary means of instruction. Three series of experiments were developed for this course. The microcomputer familiarization series gives the student background and experience in the use of the operating system commands, the high-level programming language, and how to use these in real-time application for data acquisition and control. The process control series is a problem-solving exercise in the instrumentation, control, and automation of the heating-mixing tank. The robotics series consists of the instrumentation, control, and application of a laboratory bench robot in a materials handling system. The implementation of this laboratory and its first offering are discussed. Problems involved with the equipment and the manual are presented. Student evaluations indicate the course was a success and faculty feedback is similarly positive.     

A new graduate course on neural networks

A new neural network course at the graduate level is described. The course is offered at the computer engineering department but is intended for a wider audience. It is currently taken as a technical elective by master's students at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). The course's main topics are: foundations of neural computation; architectures of neural networks; learning; dynamics; feedback models; VLSI implementations; parallel processing; and fault-tolerance. The course is not a survey of neural network models, learning algorithms, etc. It is instead an in-depth presentation of neural computing principles with illustrations from few but diverse models     

An Individually Paced Introductory Course in Network Analysis

This paper describes some results of a course in network analysis taught to all electrical and mechanical engineering sophomores at the University of New Hampshire. The report covers two years experience with the course. The first year (spring 1971) forty students took the course under an individually prescribed instruction approach (IPI) while fifty students were taught with the standard lecture-recitation method. The second year (spring 1972), all seventy students took the course under PI. Comparison between students in IPI and the lecture-recitation method by semester end test, a three month retention test, and performance in the next electrical engineering course indicate no significant difference in the material learned. A detailed questionnaire was filled out by each IPI student. Most significant were the responses that indicated that although most students considered the IPI approach to be more work, most preferred it to the standard approach.     

An Electronic Instrumentation Design Project for Computer Engineering Students

Ongoing technological progress in electronic instrumentation triggered the development of an innovative, hands-on teaching program to help students toward a fuller understanding of recent changes in the field. This paper describes the different stages of a design project to teach electronic instrumentation to computer engineering students at the University of Oviedo, GijÓn, Spain. The project involves designing a weather station to measure the main meteorological variables and then displaying this information on a computer screen. Although this course is intended for nonspecialist students of electronics, it could easily be adapted to other syllabuses with minimum modification of the specifications. The course provides not only enhanced academic training but also increased student motivation, as students participate actively in all course activities and work in a team within which each student has specific responsibilities.