Development of A Bootcamp for Freshman Student Success During COVID-19 Transition

Results from assessment show that passing rates in introductory courses as well as retention rates of first-year students in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at a HSI significantly dropped with the advent of COVID-19. Such results and trends provide an overall perspective on the academic preparation of incoming students. There is a high concern that the necessary skill set (e.g., adaptability, persistence, and performance) of the new cohort of students, who are primarily underrepresented Hispanics from underserved and challenged communities from the Rio Grande Valley, is not optimal for the rigor of engineering education. To this end, an onboarding bootcamp for incoming and transfer students was created to bridge the transition from secondary education to higher education by priming students to overcome academic deficiencies, develop a critical skills portfolio, learn problem-solving techniques, build a sustainable community of mentoring support with faculty and students, and provide a template to sustain academic and professional success during their undergraduate education. The paper presents the bootcamps’ design process steps: curricular analysis, identification of areas of opportunities, skills inventory, and blueprinting process, as well as its initial implementation in the mechanical engineering program. In this regard, the bootcamp was organized over a week span with hands-on engineering activities, faculty and student talks, and engineering lab tours; and was based on a design thinking approach. Daily activities were structured based on Challenge-based Instruction, innovation, design, and mentoring, and focused primarily on promoting critical thinking, being assertive in the face of adversity, making informed decisions, and prioritizing tasks. Results indicate that the bootcamp increased student confidence and established a valuable network system amongst other findings. Future work will focus on expanding the bootcamp to include students from other engineering and computer science departments and to offer the template to other institutions with similar challenges

Development of A Bootcamp for Freshman Student Success During COVID-19 Transition

Results from assessment show that passing rates in introductory courses as well as retention rates of first-year students in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at a HSI significantly dropped with the advent of COVID-19. Such results and trends provide an overall perspective on the academic preparation of incoming students. There is a high concern that the necessary skill set (e.g., adaptability, persistence, and performance) of the new cohort of students, who are primarily underrepresented Hispanics from underserved and challenged communities from the Rio Grande Valley, is not optimal for the rigor of engineering education. To this end, an onboarding bootcamp for incoming and transfer students was created to bridge the transition from secondary education to higher education by priming students to overcome academic deficiencies, develop a critical skills portfolio, learn problem-solving techniques, build a sustainable community of mentoring support with faculty and students, and provide a template to sustain academic and professional success during their undergraduate education. The paper presents the bootcamps’ design process steps: curricular analysis, identification of areas of opportunities, skills inventory, and blueprinting process, as well as its initial implementation in the mechanical engineering program. In this regard, the bootcamp was organized over a week span with hands-on engineering activities, faculty and student talks, and engineering lab tours; and was based on a design thinking approach. Daily activities were structured based on Challenge-based Instruction, innovation, design, and mentoring, and focused primarily on promoting critical thinking, being assertive in the face of adversity, making informed decisions, and prioritizing tasks. Results indicate that the bootcamp increased student confidence and established a valuable network system amongst other findings. Future work will focus on expanding the bootcamp to include students from other engineering and computer science departments and to offer the template to other institutions with similar challenges

Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

Developing Next-Generation Engineers -. IMPACTS

In the development of remote labs and virtual engineering tools the focus has rightly been on the technical challenges to be overcome to provide useful and usable tools and experimentation. However, the utilization of such facilities in educational settings is not simply a case of making students and faculty aware of their existence. In fact, there are significant pedagogical issues in the blending of remote and virtual facilities with cohort and location-based teaching and learning, and a number of research findings have highlighted student issues with both traditional teaching methods and the use of predominantly on-line materials. The authors have considerable experience in the development, production and use of eLearning materials in academic and industrial environments, and in tool virtualization and remote labs, and here propose a model for a distributed Masters program that supports students on a location-neutral basis utilizing online eLearning materials, virtual tools and remote lab facilities, combined with location-specific specialist teaching and learning facilities. The program described is already in operation between three European Universities, with the intention to expand both within Europe and beyond, utilizing the Erasmus Mundus scheme. The program is based on a constructivist pedagogic model that demands considerable independence of study and research on the part of the students, within a rich environment of high-quality specialist materials offered in a wide variety of modes. The authors believe that this approach optimizes the benefits of individual academic specialization in research and teaching, combined with effective use of eLearning materials, remote labs and virtual tools in a distributed environment, and thereby addresses a number of the issues identified from the research while also offering a high quality program to educate and develop next generation Engineers

A Community Framing of Integrated Engineering

The term “integrated engineering” is being used in new education programs. As a framing concept, we believe it has value for the wider engineering education community. A small group of program heads has facilitated conversations about how integrated engineering could benefit other programs and the community in general. This paper provides background and describes some of the outcomes of past conversations with the goal of including more voices in the conversation and initializing the formal use of integrated engineering as a prompt for improving engineering education

Surgical and Bioengineering Integration in the Anatomy Course of Medicine and Surgery High Technology: Knowledge and Perception of Anatomy

The Locomotor System Anatomy (LSA) course, placed in the first semester of the first year of the new Master’s degree in Medicine and Surgery High Technology (MSHT) at the Sapienza University of Rome, was integrated with surgical and bioengineering content. This study investigated the educational value and the students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of these two types of integration, comparing surgical integration (SI) with engineering integration (EI). Anatomy knowledge and students’ opinions attending the LSA course in MSHT degree (n = 30) were compared with those of students (n = 32) attending another medical and surgery course not comprising EI. Data show that students in the MSHT course like in-depth SI much more than in-depth EI. However, those who like in-depth SI also like in-depth EI. Significant differences were in anatomy knowledge between the two groups in the three sections of the test. There was no significant correlation between the three test scores and the levels of liking, while there was a significant correlation between students liking SI and those liking EI. A statistically significant correlation was also found in students who correctly responded to questions on the head and trunk, with students responding correctly to questions on the upper limbs. This study will be important in optimizing the deepening of SI and EI in the LSA course. Keywords: human anatomy; anatomical sciences education; gross anatomy teaching; locomotor system; neurosurgery; orthopedics; surgical integration; bioengineering integration; technical physician; technical medicin

From print to Web: issues in re-purposing for an Open Resources Repository

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has gained rapid support for its goals of universal access to education. The UK Open University's contribution is OpenLearn, a project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which, over the next two years, aims to re-purpose several thousand study-hours of existing learning materials for online delivery. The UK Open University has gained a hard-won reputation for the quality of its learning materials and integrated Supported Open Learning model. However, these materials are, as a rule, developed within the framework of long courses that typically require between 300 and 600 hours of study. Furthermore, many of the courses are 'interdisciplinary' in that they are developed by teams that include members associated with different faculties. The courses are, therefore, generally structured in terms of themes that run throughout the course and may span a variety of academic disciplines. Also, despite the breadth of knowledge brought into play when a course is developed, the courses normally reflect pedagogical and disciplinary assumptions and views that are prevalent in the UK. Based on the authors' experience of the OpenLearn project, this paper explores some of the key issues encountered when re-purposing resources. These issues include how to provide material not supported by tutorial guidance, the suitability of media components for conversion and the inter-relationship between the multimedia components. The paper will also briefly discuss the requirements for evaluation of the re-purposing process. The issues raised are potentially of relevance to other re-purposing initiatives

The Bulletin: Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, Volume 65, Issue 4, Fall 2016

This issue includes: Creating the Ideal Physician-One Note at a Time: The Dean\u27s concert series is more than a respite in the middle of a busy day at SKMC Tiny Bubbles, Big Future: New uses for microbubble-filled ultrasound contrast agents could reduce the need for highly invasive medical tests. Dean\u27s Column Findings: New pathway to treat heart failure #Giving Tuesday: A Message from Elizabeth Dale On Campus Clara Callahan, MD: A keen eye for aspiring physicians Kate Sugarman, MD \u2788: A career guided by social justice Nick Benvenuto: Finding Science and Art in Both Winemaking and Medicine Class Notes In Memoriam Time Capsule By the Number

Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology: report from the Inspectorate (FEFC inspection report; 50/95 and 18/98)

The Further Education Funding Council has a legal duty to make sure further education in England is properly assessed. The FEFC’s inspectorate inspects and reports on each college of further education according to a four-year cycle. This record comprises the reports for periods 1994-95 and 1997-98

The ‘Meanings’ and ‘Enactments’ of Science and Technology: ANT-Mobilities’ Analysis of Two Cases

In this work I study two cases involving practices of science and technology in the backdrop of related and recent curricular reforms in both settings. The first case study is based on the 2005 South Asian earthquake in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan which led to massive losses including large scale injuries and disabilities. This led to reforms at many levels ranging from disaster management to action plans on disability, including educational reforms in rehabilitation sciences. Local efforts to deal with this disaster led to innovative approaches such as the formation of a Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) model by a local NGO, which I study in detail. The second case study is based on the recent reform of science and technology curriculum in Ontario, which is related to the release of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) reports. With climate change science driving this reform with curricular demands for students to learn ‘what scientists do’, my second case study details the formation of the Canadian CloudSat CALIPSO Validation Project (C3VP) and scientific practices which depict cutting edge science related to climate change. Towards contending with the complexity inherent in these cases, I have developed a hybrid framework which is based on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the mobilities paradigm while drawing on some aspects of the Annales school of historians. The resulting historical sociology or historiography depicts how these various networks were formed via mobilities of various actor-networks and vice versa. The practices involved in both cases evolved over time and required innovation in times of crises and challenges, and are far more than simple applications of method as required by biomedical and positivist representations of science inherent in both educational reforms. Non-human agency in the form of crisis and disaster also emerges as a key reason for the formation of these networks. Drawing from both cases, I introduce the concept of “transectionalities” as a metaphor which represent configurations of actor-networks in science and technology geared towards dealing with crisis and disaster scenarios. Based on these findings, I also extend the idea of “multiple ontologies” by Mol (2002) to “Epistemic-Ontologic-Techne-” configurations which is sensitive to considerations of time. Moreover, I also find that mathematics is a key mobilizing actor and material semiotic which mediates communication between humans and non-humans and term these dynamics as “mathematical mobilities.” Based on case study one, I also suggest the notion of “affective care” in clinical reasoning, which is based on enhancing the beneficial effect of human to human relationships in these engagements