Traditional, video and extended reality (XR) assisted flipped classroom teaching methods:an approach and comparison

This paper examines the comparative effectiveness of three distinct Flipped Classroom (FC) teaching methods in the context of Power and Electrical (PE) engineering education: Traditional Flipped Classroom (TFC), Video-Assisted Teaching Methods (VAFC), and Virtual Reality Flipped Classroom (VRFC). The study incorporates valuable feedback from students who experienced these methods and provides an evaluation of their perceptions. A cross-over methodology for comparing these FC methods is presented. The VAFC method is perceived to be an effective approach and preferred over TFC and VRFC by students. The paper also provides Teachers' perception in implementing above FC methods, which outlines a process for developing VAFC and VRFC teaching resources. Operational difficulties in implementing such methods are highlighted, especially in the context of fast-paced, privately-catered undergraduate education sector striving for implementing non-conventional teaching methods

Investigating engineering students' learning for global preparedness in curricular and cocurricular engineering education

2019 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Engineering as a profession has a significant impact globally in the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure and technology on which humanity relies. As resource constraints and dramatic global population growth challenge engineering's ability to support sustainable, appropriate development globally, the education provided for engineers is increasingly important for preparing engineering students to face the challenges of the present and future. Therefore, it is essential to understand how engineering students can become more globally prepared in their studies. The purpose of this study is to compare, through student experiences, different classes, and programs in engineering education designed to develop students' capabilities in global preparedness. The data for this project were collected through interviews with students who were taking part in different learning curricular and cocurricular classes and programs. In addition, data were collected through pre/post/retrospective-pre-student surveys when possible (for participant groups of greater than 30). The outcomes of this study are presented in three articles. The first article is a structured literature review of the global and professional competencies recognized by academia and engineering practitioners as key experiences and learning designed to improve undergraduate engineering students' global preparedness. The second article is a mixed methods analysis, comparing on-campus classroom development of global preparedness and the impact of changing the context of the engineering class (from local to global) on student's global preparedness and professional competence development. The final article reports on the results of interviews with students participating in different study abroad and volunteer programs, to compare and contrast their experiences in and the impact of those programs. The value of this study is that universities and students may be able to use these results to better understand how to more effectively design and deliver classes and programs to increase the global and professional preparedness of engineering students

Supporting the development of shared understanding in distributed design teams

Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of engineering design work. One key factor in the success of these teams is the development of short- and longer-term shared understanding. A lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context of globally distributed engineering activities. A major antecedent for shared understanding is question asking and feedback. Building on question-asking theory this work uses a quasi-experimental study to test the impact of questioning support on homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The results show significant improvement in shared understanding for both team types (27% improvement for heterogeneous and 16% for homogeneous), as well as substantial differences in how this improvement is perceived. This extends theoretical insight on the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams in the engineering design context. This has implications for how distributed teams can be more effectively supported in practice, as well as how shared understanding can be facilitated in engineering design

An experimental study of the effects of modularity on resource consumption in software development

Many authors have encouraged the use of modular programming techniques in software development. In fact, there is almost total agreement within industrial and academic circles that modularity is a desirable feature of any software package. Unfortunately, the desirability of modular design is almost always voiced without support from experimental evidence. This thesis consists of an experiment comparing the resource consumption of programmers based on the modularity practices employed during the design and programming phases of software development. The experiment tests the effectiveness of modularity in reducing psychological complexity of software. The results of the research show that in some cases there is indeed a difference in resource consumption between the modularity practices tested. However, the stated benefits of modularity did not carry over to the design and programming phases of software development. The use of modularity seemed, in fact, to increase development costs in some cases --Abstract, page ii

Elementary Teachers’ Mental Models of Engineering Design Processes: A Comparison of Two Communities of Practice

Educating K-12 students in the processes of design engineering is gaining popularity in public schools. Several states have adopted standards for engineering design despite the fact that no common agreement exists on what should be included in the K-12 engineering design process. Furthermore, little pre-service and in-service professional development exists that will prepare teachers to teach a design process that is fundamentally different from the science teaching process found in typical public schools. This study provides a glimpse into what teachers think happens in engineering design compared to articulated best practices in engineering design. Wenger’s communities of practice work and van Dijk’s multidisciplinary theory of mental models provide the theoretical bases for comparing the mental models of two groups of elementary teachers (one group that teaches engineering and one that does not) to the mental models of design engineers (including this engineer/researcher/educator and professionals described elsewhere). The elementary school teachers and this engineer/researcher/educator observed the design engineering process enacted by professionals, then answered questions designed to elicit their mental models of the process they saw in terms of how they would teach it to elementary students. The key finding is this: Both groups of teachers embedded the cognitive steps of the design process into the matrix of the social and emotional roles and skills of students. Conversely, the engineers embedded the social and emotional aspects of the design process into the matrix of the cognitive steps of the design process. In other words, teachers’ mental models show that they perceive that students’ social and emotional communicative roles and skills in the classroom drive their cognitive understandings of the engineering process, while the mental models of this engineer/researcher/educator and the engineers in the video show that we perceive that cognitive understandings of the engineering process drive the social and emotional roles and skills used in that process. This comparison of mental models with the process that professional designers use defines a problem space for future studies that investigate how to incorporate engineering practices into elementary classrooms. Recommendations for engineering curriculum development and teacher professional development based on this study are presented

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

eCulture: examining and quantifying cultural differences in user acceptance between Chinese and British web site users

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of LutonThe World Wide Web (WWW) has become an important medium for communicating between people all over the world. It is regarded as a global system and is associated with a wide user and social system diversity. The effects of differing user-groups and their associated cultures on user acceptance of web sites can be significant, and as a result understanding the behaviour of web users in various cultures is becoming a significant concern. The eCulture research project is based on previous classical theories and research in culture. It applies a factorial experimental design strategy (the Taguchi method) in crosscultural usability / acceptability, together with other approaches such as semiotic analysis and card sorting. Two types of analysis, both top-down and bottom-up have been implemented to investigate differences in web site usability and acceptability between users from Mainland China and the United Kingdom. Based on experiments on web sites investigating the relationship between cultural issues and usability lacceptability aspects between Chinese and British web users, several issues, such as cultural factors, cognitive abilities, social semiotic differences and other issues have emerged. One of the goals has been to develop 'cultural fingerprints' for both web sites and users in different cultures. By comparing cultural and site fingerprints, usability and acceptability of web sites can be diagrammatically matched to the target culture. Experiments investigating qualitative factors and quantitative data collection and analysis based on the Taguchi method has led to the successful development of two versions of 'cultural fingerprint' for both web sites and target cultures in the UK and China. It has been possible to relate these studies to a wider body of knowledge, and to suggest ways in which the work may be extended in the future

Geosimulation and Multicriteria Modelling of Residential Land Development in the City of Tehran: A Comparative Analysis of Global and Local Models

Conventional models for simulating land-use patterns are insufficient in addressing complex dynamics of urban systems. A new generation of urban models, inspired by research on cellular automata and multi-agent systems, has been proposed to address the drawbacks of conventional modelling. This new generation of urban models is called geosimulation. Geosimulation attempts to model macro-scale patterns using micro-scale urban entities such as vehicles, homeowners, and households. The urban entities are represented by agents in the geosimulation modelling. Each type of agents has different preferences and priorities and shows different behaviours. In the land-use modelling context, the behaviour of agents is their ability to evaluate the suitability of parcels of land using a number of factors (criteria and constraints), and choose the best land(s) for a specific purpose. Multicriteria analysis provides a set of methods and procedures that can be used in the geosimulation modelling to describe the behaviours of agents. There are three main objectives of this research. First, a framework for integrating multicriteria models into geosimulation procedures is developed to simulate residential development in the City of Tehran. Specifically, the local form of multicriteria models is used as a method for modelling agents’ behaviours. Second, the framework is tested in the context of residential land development in Tehran between 1996 and 2006. The empirical research is focused on identifying the spatial patterns of land suitability for residential development taking into account the preferences of three groups of actors (agents): households, developers, and local authorities. Third, a comparative analysis of the results of the geosimulation-multicriteria models is performed. A number of global and local geosimulation-multicriteria models (scenarios) of residential development in Tehran are defined and then the results obtained by the scenarios are evaluated and examined. The output of each geosimulation-multicriteria model is compared to the results of other models and to the actual pattern of land-use in Tehran. The analysis is focused on comparing the results of the local and global geosimulation-multicriteria models. Accuracy measures and spatial metrics are used in the comparative analysis. The results suggest that, in general, the local geosimulation-multicriteria models perform better than the global methods

Global village - shelter for resilient living 2 : conference proceedings / Balkan Architectural Biennale [BAB], 21-23th of November 2023.

The conference will open debates about the diverse paradigms of suburban, rural, and urban places in today's global society, and it will do so by comparing these three types of locations. The primary point of contention is whether a Global Village should be categorized as an idealistic utopia or a feasible possibility for the foreseeable future. This debate will explore the advantages and disadvantages of each type of location, considering factors such as population density, infrastructure, and access to resources. Additionally, it will delve into the social, economic, and environmental implications of striving towards a Global Village concept[https://www.bab.rs/2023/12/11/on-line-cp-global-village-shelter-for-resilient-living-2

Impacts of Project-Based Service-Learning on Attitudes Towards Engineering in High School and First-Year Undergraduate Students

Interest in whether real-world problems or a service learning context increases students' academic performance and intent to find careers in engineering is gaining momentum. The belief that diverse student populations resonate with the idea that engineers can contribute to improving society is found throughout the literature, supporting the combination of service-learning with project-based courses as an instructional method that can impact identification with engineering in high school and first-year students, potentially increasing the recruitment and retention of capable and interested learners. While study of these reforms indicates many advantages, little meaningful evidence exists on the psychological and educational benefits from engaging in project-based service-learning.This thesis examines the evolving identity and attitudes towards community service for both high school and first-year engineering students engaged in project-based design, and whether a service-learning context influences these changing attitudes. Quantitative Likert-style surveys were developed from previously validated instruments and administered to students pre-to post-semester. Each participant was surveyed multiple times during their design experience, and the survey results were aggregated to offer insight into their evolving attitudes towards identity with engineering and service to the community. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) methods, students' responses to survey items were analyzed by comparing students in multiple service and non-service sections of a project-based design course at the high school and first-year engineering levels. Study results indicate that a service-learning context in project-based courses positively impacts identity and attitudes towards community service in targeted underrepresented populations of high school and undergraduate students. A ceiling effect was apparent for some students at both levels, who were predisposed to high community service attitudes and identification with engineering. Based on the results of this study, K-12 and undergraduate should consider project-based service-learning engineering design experiences early and often to improve students' identification with engineering, demonstrate professional and societal relevance of engineering, and potentially increase the interest and retention of a diverse population of students, including women and minorities, into the pipeline of engineering education and engineering workforce