Creative Circuits with Deaf Students

This paper presents an outreach program, designed and delivered by undergraduate engineering students, to introduce deaf middle and high school students to engineering through creative circuits. Over the course of four weekly two-hour long Creative Circuits workshops, students aged 10 to 14 years old worked on projects exploring basic circuitry and programing concepts. Instruction was given through American Sign Language and written communication. E-textiles, Squishy Circuits, Scratch, and MaKey MaKey were used. We will present the content of these workshops, reflections by the undergraduate students on the experience of leading these workshops, and suggestions for running similar program

Incorporation of Agile Development Methodology into a Capstone Software Engineering Project

This paper describes the incorporation of agile development methodology into a capstone software engineering project course. The author has been teaching a team-based software project course for nearly two decades. In the past, teams were required to use a traditional prescriptive development process that employed detailed up-front requirements analysis and emphasis on high-level design. These front-end loaded processes placed a heavy emphasis on detailed documentation and deferred the onset of coding until a number of weeks into the semester. With little experience in gathering and documenting requirements, student teams generally struggled with this phase of the project and often failed to capture a complete enough set of requirements to provide an adequate basis for subsequent design activities. The late start in coding often meant that teams were not able to implement as much functionality as desired and quality was sometimes adversely impacted by the rushed development effort. For the spring, 2014 offering, it was decided to drastically modify the capstone course to employ an agile development methodology. Agile development is based upon that notion of lightweight processes that eschew front-end loading of analysis and design in favor of self-organizing teams that execute multiple, short development sprints, each focusing on completion of a small subset of product features. While agile development has been widely embraced by industry over the past decade, its adoption within academia is still nascent, most likely due to its perceived abandonment of formal process and rigid methodology. Software engineering textbooks have only recently begun to include coverage of agile development. For the course, 25 students were divided into five agile teams. The students had limited knowledge of, and experience with, agile development methodologies from a prerequisite course. During the first two weeks of the semester, while teams worked on developing the concept for their projects, an intensive introduction to a popular agile methodology called SCRUM was conducted. Students were introduced to an on-line tool called Pivotal Tracker to organize and track the progress of their development sprints. Teams were also required to develop a comprehensive testing strategy and identify appropriate testing tools. The teams then embarked on a sequence of six two-week development sprints. At the conclusion of each sprint teams were required to do an in-class progress review and retrospective. Compared to the previous offerings of the course using a prescriptive development process, the use of agile methodology allowed students to complete considerably more scope during the semester. The relatively large number of short-duration development sprints forced teams to work consistently and productively, and to effectively use automated testing and configuration management tools. Overall, the scope and quality of projects improved significantly compared to prior offerings of the course

Shape and Fluid Drag: an Experience with Just-in-time Learning

Just-in-time learning emphasizes an approach that tends to be learner-controlled, and relatively modular in nature. In an undergraduate course on Fluid Mechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, students worked in small groups to learn about the essentials of form drag in a one-hour laboratory session. There was no prior lecture on this topic in class. Based on observing the visualization of flow around a sphere, and analysis of the corresponding force measurements taken by them, students developed a working understanding of the nature of drag. They built upon this understanding by making informal predictions about the drag and flow corresponding to several other simple shapes, and tested out their hypotheses immediately in the lab. The hands-on, learner-driven approach helped to build in the students a strong intuitive sense of how flows interact with different shapes. In the process, they were also exposed to a range of experimental methods in fluid mechanics, and the importance of relevant non-dimensional parameters from a utilitarian perspective. From a pedagogical perspective, it was an interesting demonstration of the attributes of just-in-time learning: small groups of students with disparate strengths and interests worked together to understand a complex problem, and developed a refined sense of predictive ability by utilizing a broad range of tools and information bases

Building Trust, Experiential Learning, and the Importance of Sovereignty: Capacity Building in Pre-Engineering Education - a Tribal College Perspective

At tribal colleges and mainstream universities, program success is often identified solely with matriculation and graduation rates. However, particularly for new STEM programs, capacity building is another key measure of success. In this paper, three of the co-authors, who are faculty members at a tribally-controlled college and participants in a multi-year collaborative pre-engineering education initiative between a tribal college and two mainstream universities, provide their perspectives on capacity building in summer camp activities within the alliance. The three each wrote essays reflecting on capacity building, guided by pre-determined questions written by the fourth author. Through qualitative analysis, we present common themes, divergent opinions, and quotations extracted from the essays from their unique perspective as faculty at a tribally-controlled college. We emphasize impacts among the partnering schools, faculty, students, and communities where the summer camp activities took place. Three common themes dominated the essays including the importance of (1) building trust within the reservation community, (2) recognizing the effectiveness of experiential and project-based service-learning approaches, and (3) encouraging tribally-controlled colleges to take a lead role in determining research and educational foci

Flipping Without the Cold Turkey

Flipping is an appealing method to engage students for meaningful and active learning. However, the work needed to generate the content the students will use outside the classroom and to coordinate the activities the students will do inside the classroom seems daunting. This paper provides ideas to reduce the start-up costs in time and energy, essential elements to include in the implementation of the flip, and instructor and student behaviors that may need adjusting for a more effective flipped experience. These helpful hints are based on the author’s experience in flipping her sophomore-level chemical engineering required course for the first time last fall

Understanding Engineering Students\u27 Perceptions and Knowledge about Sustainable Development and Sustainability

The Sustainable Engineering and International Development course was first offered to engineering majors at the Iowa State University (ISU) in 2005. The course is focused on describing, discussing and comparing the key concepts of sustainability, sustainable development and sustainable engineering. In 2005, sustainability was not a major part of the engineering curricula and students had little to no knowledge about these concepts. Nine years later, sustainability has become an integral part of our daily lives. In this study, we wanted to understand student perceptions, knowledge, and understanding of sustainability, sustainable development and its implementation across various engineering systems. The assessment techniques used for the study were a pre-test and a survey at the start and end of the semester, respectively. Survey results indicated that students’ ranking on usefulness of the course modules varied over the years mainly due to different engineering majors of the students in the class with diverse learning styles and pre-existing knowledge. The results of the pre-test indicated that students have knowledge about basic sustainability concepts, thus the difficulty level of the pretest was low. In the near future, focus group discussions along with the survey will be conducted to better understand student perceptions on the effectiveness of the teaching methods and overall course materials. In addition, a post-test will be conducted for the questions set developed with input from experts in specific subject areas

An Ethical Framework for Engineering Faculty: Motivation, Examples & Discussion

Engineering faculty address ethics from two perspectives. The first is as required content related to the ABET outcome that engineering graduates will have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility. The second is as practitioners who face a range of ethical dilemmas and challenges, from plagiarism to “passenger” team members to professional relationships with colleagues to responsible conduct of their own research. As faculty members and professionals, we have multiple guides, including the recently adopted ASEE Code of Ethics (http://www.asee.org/member-resources/resources/Code_of_Ethics.pdf), however, there is still a need to examine frameworks and develop skills in both practicing and teaching professional and ethical responsibility. This presentation and paper will present a framework used at multiple institutions and previously presented at the national conference by Bates & Loui (2013). The approach starts with identifying stakeholders, gathering information and considering alternative actions and consequences. These actions are then evaluated with a series of tests related to basic ethical values: Harm test: Do the benefits outweigh the harms, short term and long term? Reversibility test: Would this choice still look good if I traded places? Common practice test: What if everyone behaved in this way? Legality test: Would this choice violate a law or a policy of my employer? Colleague test: What would professional colleagues say? Wise relative test: What would my wise old aunt or uncle do? Mirror test: Would I feel proud of myself when I look into the mirror? Publicity test: How would this choice look on the front page of a newspaper? Interactive discussion will include ways this approach has been used in multidisciplinary STEM classes and ways it can be used by faculty to support reflection on their own practice. The paper and presentation will also include links to supporting resources such as NAE’s growing Online Ethics Center and the Ethics CORE (Collaborative Online Resource Environment) portal

Increasing Material Coverage in Software Engineering through the Introduction of the Flipped Classroom

Software Engineering represents a rapidly changing engineering discipline. As a young discipline, the field has reached the same level of maturity as other engineering disciplines. Furthermore, as a rapidly evolving field, it also is encountering greater change than many other disciplines of engineering. This change leads to a much greater challenge meeting the needs of diverse engineering constituents. More material must be taught in each course and at a faster pace in order to ensure that students are ready for the demands of industry. At the Milwaukee School of Engineering, curriculum changes have resulted in a reduction in lab content and credit for courses. In one course, Operating Systems, the lab component has been removed entirely. However, through prudent course design and the usage of the flipped classroom, the same amount of content was able to be covered in less time. This article will present an analysis of the findings of applying the flipped classroom to teaching operating systems to software engineering students. Included will be analysis of student performance from control groups prior to the curriculum conversion, as well as observations from students on the usage of the flipped classroo

Multiple Learning Strategies and Assessments used in an Online Technology, Society & Ethics Course

The author of this article has taught Electronics Engineering Technology courses for 20+ years, mostly in a classroom face-to-face setting. The assessment of student learning depends mostly on the evaluation of how well the students have learned the theory-based, numerically-involved, and hands-on applications of each course’s content. For the past three summers, the author has also taught an on-line course entitled Technology, Society & Ethics. This kind of course calls for an emphasis on discussion and student writing, which requires a very different style of teaching and assessment than the instructor had used in the past. As a preparation for teaching the course for the first time, the learning outcomes of the course were developed before the specific teaching style and assessment process were chosen. Suskie1 says that for good assessment, the instructor at the start needs to “develop clearly articulated written statements of expected learning outcomes”, that is, what will the students know and be able to do by the end of the course. For the course, the Student Learning Outcomes statements must meet the requirements of three different entities: ABET, the university’s General Education requirements, and the student evaluation of teaching process the university uses, which comes from the IDEA Center2. The IDEA Center has developed a list of twelve Learning Objectives (‘Objective’ as used by IDEA means the same as ‘Outcome’) that the course instructor can choose from, as the focus of the student’s evaluation of the learning the students achieved in the course. The course instructor chose three objectives to focus on: Learning how to find and use resources for answering questions or solving problems; Developing a clearer understanding of, and a commitment to, personal values; and Acquiring an interest in learning more by asking my own questions and seeking answers. Educational research highlighted by the IDEA Center and others show that multiple learning strategies can engage students in a wide variety of ways and provide learning opportunities for many types of learners, in order to help them reach the learning objectives chosen for the course. The different strategies that the course instructor has used are: textbook readings, posting PowerPoints outlining the course topics, short video presentations on the course topics, student-to-student and student-to-instructor discussion postings using the online course management system (D2L), live Collaborate (online, interactive voice) discussion sessions, three rounds of writing and feedback on a research paper on a specific topic, individual reviews of the course topics, and individual reviews of TED Talks. Some learning strategies have worked well, some have not, as measured by informal and formal student feedback. The paper will review the course assessment results, including student evaluation of teaching scores

Stories to Inspire Very Young Engineers: Can Robots Burp?

The importance of reading to preschool and kindergarten aged children has been well documented. This paper presents in-progress work developing a methodology for assessing the engineering and STEM content in books intended for this age group. Of particular interest is whether the STEM content is portrayed accurately. We present a sample investigation and rubric, focusing on robots