Hybrid Courses Based on Basic Sciences and Green Technologies in Engineering Programs

An ineluctable topic has emerged and needs to be treated in engineering programs for green energies. Particularly in the programs of electrical and systems engineering, students can acquire the capabilities to envision the arrival of green standards to generate clean energy sources. In this article, the introduction of new forms of green energy is systematically presented through a basic experiment in electricity in which a potato is used to investigate the current and electric power. The experiences were conducted at the 2022-I at a private university in Lima City. The results demonstrated that the topic of biofuel in the framework of green energy can be studied in undergraduate courses. Indeed, prospective students of engineering can be oriented toward research in engineering for the implementation of new electrical systems that provide electricity with low budgets

Evaluating a Course for Teaching Advanced Programming Concepts with Scratch to Preservice Kindergarten Teachers: A Case Study in Greece

Coding is a new literacy for the twenty-first century, and as a literacy, coding enables new ways of thinking and new ways of communicating and expressing ideas, as well as new ways of civic participation. A growing number of countries, in Europe and beyond, have established clear policies and frameworks for introducing computational thinking (CT) and computer programming to young children. In this chapter, we discuss a game-based approach to coding education for preservice kindergarten teachers using Scratch. The aim of using Scratch was to excite students’ interest and familiarize them with the basics of programming in an open-ended, project-based, and personally meaningful environment for a semester course in the Department of Preschool Education in the University of Crete. For 13 weeks, students were introduced to the main Scratch concepts and, afterward, were asked to prepare their projects. For the projects, they were required to design their own interactive stories to teach certain concepts about mathematics or physical science to preschool-age students. The results we obtained were more satisfactory than expected and, in some regards, encouraging if one considers the fact that the research participants had no prior experiences with computational thinking

Education support structure for teaching multimodal programming in the cyber-physical space

Programming education has become a mandatory element of many engineering curriculums, covering skills from digitally controlled mechanical processes to intelligent traffic and aviation systems. Many of these disciplines require the interaction with physical devices as programming interfaces. Higher education institutions focusing on quality presence labs with the need for occasional online teaching are thus looking for blended and multimodal solutions in which the physical interaction can be carried over as much as possible into the digital channels. In these solutions, various touch points between the physical and digital worlds should be exploited. This paper contributes such a solution. It introduces a cyber-physical educational support structure called EPOSS aimed at programming ’things’, including robots and derivative stationary and mobile units, that works in flexible lab and online teaching combinations. The system integrates domain-specific scenarios and open data sources for realistic autoprogramming simulations and is made available as open source prototype to foster adoption. The usefulness of the support system is demonstrated with traffic engineering education scenarios

Architectural Indoor Analysis: A Holistic Approach to Understand the Relation of Higher Education Classrooms and Academic Performance

The influence of learning space on users has been broadly accepted and tested. However, the literature has focused on single factor research, instead of holistic approaches. Additionally, lower educational levels have been the focus of interest, while higher education is moving towards multi-method teaching. This paper focuses on how learning spaces for different purposes (practice and lecture rooms) may influence academic performance from a holistic approach of learning physical environment perception. For this, the iPEP scale (Indoor physical environment perception) is used and validated through Cronbach Alpha and Exploratory Factorial Analysis. Then, multiple linear regression is conducted. The results indicate that iPEP measures near to 63 percent of the construct, which is structured in six factors. Moreover, linear regression analyses support previous literature concerning the influence of learning physical environment on academic performance (R2 = 0.154). The differences obtained between practice and lecture room in terms of predictor variables bring to the light the need to diagnose learning environments before designing changes in educational buildings. This research provides a self-reported way to measure indoor environments, as well as evidence concerning the modern university, which desires to combine several teaching methods

Design and development of a 5-Channel Arduino-Based Data Acquisition System (ABDAS) for experimental aerodynamics research

In this work, a new and low-cost Arduino-Based Data Acquisition System (ABDAS) for use in an aerodynamics lab is developed. Its design is simple and reliable. The accuracy of the system has been checked by being directly compared with a commercial and high accuracy level hardware from National Instruments. Furthermore, ABDAS has been compared to the accredited calibration system in the IDR/UPM Institute, its measurements during this testing campaign being used to analyzed two different cup anemometer frequency determination procedures: counting pulses and the Fourier transform. The results indicate a more accurate transfer function of the cup anemometers when counting pulses procedure is used

Targeted Blended Learning through Competency Assessment in an Undergraduate Information Systems Program

The author Joelle Elmaleh was publishing under the name Joelle Ducrot.</p

Continuity versus Desertion in Pandemic Times: The Management of Engineering Schools in a Peruvian Private University via Big-Data Analysis †

The main consequence of the arrival of COVID-19 was the application of social distancing, which mainly had implications regarding the economies of affected countries. This affected students, whose economy was weakened because of social restrictions. Therefore, private universities that depend strongly on the continuity of students had to face some difficult periods, with an eventual increase in desertions. In this way, the general managers’ offices had to find new and consistent directions for correct decision making without reducing the quality of the service. This paper presents a scheme that was applied in a private university in the south of Lima city during the period of 2020–2021. It is shown that the usage of a set of variables and their combinations to make a decision only appears to be relevant if a such decision is free of either external or internal noise. The results exhibit a minimization of 70% in the potential number of desertions in 2021 due to the gained experiences of 2020

Raspberry Pi: An Effective Vehicle in Teaching the Internet of Things in Computer Science and Engineering

The Raspberry Pi is being increasingly adopted as a suitable platform in both research and applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). This study presents a novel project-based teaching and learning approach devised in an Internet of Things course for undergraduate students in the computer science major, where the Raspberry Pi platform is used as an effective vehicle to greatly enhance students’ learning performance and experience. The devised course begins with learning simple hardware and moves to building a whole prototype system. This paper illustrates the outcome of the proposed approach by demonstrating the prototype IoT systems designed and developed by students at the end of one such IoT course. Furthermore, this study provides insights and lessons regarding how to facilitate the use of the Raspberry Pi platform to successfully achieve the goals of project-based teaching and learning in IoT