Problem based learning case in a control undergraduate subject

Brescia, 4-6 Nov., 2015Student motivation is a relevant subject in many engineering areas including control and related subjects such as instrumentation. The classic approach to teaching has revealed itself a major obstacle for today’s students characterized by a being users of advanced technology in their daily life. Theoretical classes and even old laboratory experiments are of no appeal to them. In this paper a case study of the application of Problem Based Learning ideas is presented. The students are faced with a design problem in which they build a temperature control from basics components. The experience took place at the Engineering College of the University of Seville. The results shown are drawn from a three-year study and are compared with other undergraduate subjects

NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program

The contractor's report contains all sixteen final reports prepared by the participants in the 1989 Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. Reports describe research projects on a number of different topics. Interface software, metal corrosion, rocket triggering lightning, automatic drawing, 60-Hertz power, carotid-cardiac baroreflex, acoustic fields, robotics, AI, CAD/CAE, cryogenics, titanium, and flow measurement are discussed

Basic Communication Course Annual Vol. 15

Full Issue (190 pages, 6.997 MB

The Engineering Design Process: Conceptions Along the Learning-to-Teach Continuum

In this study, I sought to identify differences in the views and understandings of engineering design among individuals along the learning-to-teach continuum. To do so, I conducted a comprehensive review of literature to determine the various aspects of engineering design described in the fields of professional engineering and engineering education. Additionally, I reviewed literature on the methods used in teaching engineering design at the secondary (grade 7-12) level – to describe the various models used in classrooms, even before the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Last, I defined four groups along the learning-to-teach continuum: prospective, preservice, and practicing teachers, as well as teacher educators.The context of this study centered around a California public university, including an internship program where undergraduates engaged with practicing mentor teachers in science and engineering teaching at local high schools, and a teacher education program where secondary science preservice teachers and the teacher educators who taught them participated. Interviews were conducted with all participants to gain insights into their views and understandings of engineering design. Prospective and preservice teachers were interviewed multiple times throughout the year and completed concept maps of the engineering design process multiple times as well; practicing teachers and teacher educators were interviewed once.Three levels of analyses were conducted. I identified 30 aspects of engineering discussed by participants. Through phenomenographic methods, I also constructed six conceptual categories for engineering design to organize those aspects most commonly discussed. These categories were combined to demonstrate a participant’s view of engineering design (e.g., business focused, human centered, creative, etc.) as well as their complexity of understanding of engineering design overall (the more categories their ideas fit within, the more complex their understanding was thought to be).I found that the most commonly referenced aspects of engineering design were in line with the three main dimensions described in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). I also found that the practicing teacher participants overall conveyed the most complex and integrated understandings of engineering design, with the undergraduate, prospective teachers not far behind. One of the most important factors related to a more integrated understanding of engineering design was having formal engineering experience, especially in the form of conducting engineering research or having been a professional engineer. Further, I found that female participants were more likely than their male counterparts to view engineering as having a human element—recognizing the need to collaborate with others throughout the process and the need to think about the potential user of the product the engineer is solving the problem for. These findings suggest that prior experience with engineering, and not experience in the classroom or with engineering education, tends to lead to a deeper, more authentic view of engineering. Finally, I close with a discussion of the overall findings, limitations of the study, potential implications, and future work

Algorithms for information extraction and signal annotation on long-term biosignals using clustering techniques

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia BiomédicaOne of the biggest challenges when analysing data is to extract information from it, especially if we dealing with very large sized data, which brings a new set of barriers to be overcome. The extracted information can be used to aid physicians in their diagnosis since biosignals often carry vital information on the subjects. In this research work, we present a signal-independent algorithm with two main goals: perform events detection in biosignals and, with those events, extract information using a set of distance measures which will be used as input to a parallel version of the k-means clustering algorithm. The first goal is achieved by using two different approaches. Events can be found based on peaks detection through an adaptive threshold defined as the signal’s root mean square (RMS) or by morphological analysis through the computation of the signal’s meanwave. The final goal is achieved by dividing the distance measures into n parts and by performing k-means individually. In order to improve speed performance, parallel computing techniques were applied. For this study, a set of different types of signals was acquired and annotated by our algorithm. By visual inspection, the L1 and L2 Minkowski distances returned an output that allowed clustering signals’ cycles with an efficiency of 97:5% and 97:3%, respectively. Using the meanwave distance, our algorithm achieved an accuracy of 97:4%. For the downloaded ECGs from the Physionet databases, the developed algorithm detected 638 out of 644 manually annotated events provided by physicians. The fact that this algorithm can be applied to long-term raw biosignals and without requiring any prior information about them makes it an important contribution in biosignals’ information extraction and annotation

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference