Development and Implementation of a Long-Term Freshmen Service Project: The Design and Deployment of an Engineering Outreach Experience for Underserved Populations

Freshmen year programs in engineering have received recent and growing attention as a method to engage first year students in their profession and start them on a path to success. Service learning is a well-known pedagogical method that has been shown to improve retention, especially of underrepresented groups in engineering, and to promote deeper learning through reflection. This paper describes the implementation of a new long-term (full year) service learning project where 240 freshmen mechanical engineering students worked together in small teams to design and deploy an engineering outreach experience for a designated age-group of 4th-11th grade students. This educational experience is designed to expose the freshmen engineering students to a variety of concepts and skills necessary for successful negotiation of their engineering careers. The project encourages the freshmen to challenge their assumptions and conceptions of what an engineer is and does. Other knowledge and skills gained include understanding and using the engineering design process, effectively working on engineering teams, effectively communicating, planning and making decisions, all while solving an open-ended problem. The experience also asks the freshmen to consider diverse perspectives as they design for the targeted populations. The paper describes the project implementation and presents results from student reflections and from a survey. Lessons learned and recommendations for best practices are also presented

A Home Device for Vestibular Stimulation

The goal of this project, which was presented to the team by Kevin Maher (President of Advanced Therapeutic devices), was to develop a product prototype for safe, vestibular stimulation for children with developmental disabilities. Vestibular stimulation is a form of therapy that increases muscle coordination. It works by stimulating the canals and sacs within the inner ear that detect accelerations. The project targeted children from ages two to seven years old, under 48 inches tall, and less than 100 lbs. The production device also sought to differ from stimulation devices found in hospitals in a few respects: it would cost under $5000, reside in a patient’s home, be hand-powered, and be controlled by an average person. The final device needed to support a 200 lb. load at the edge of the structure and adjust for the center of gravities for the range of children. After sessions of brainstorming, the team produced three workable layouts, only one was adequate. The final setup had a structure of ¼ in. aluminum structural pipe similar to a football field goal. This structure mounted on a single bearing housing and steel shaft. The final design had two bars to mount weights in order to adjust the center of gravity. The prototype, however, used a swinging bar, lock, and a sliding weight. The final prototype had an adjustable footrest and a five-point restraint harness. The final cost and weight was$1700 and no more than 500 lb. The design met all of the requirements and had adequate safety for any child’s needs, but the team thought the design needed significant changes before it became a final product

Learning Design through the Lens of Service: A Qualitative Study

Twenty-four senior-level capstone engineering design projects were completed at a large, public, primarily undergraduate university involving 85 students (70 male and 15 female). All projects involved the design of equipment to facilitate physical activity for people with disabilities. The effects on: i) learning design, ii) attitude towards people with disabilities, iii) motivation to complete team design projects and iv) interdisciplinary collaboration were analyzed through 24 one-hour focus groups. We explored the student experience using a constructivist approach and grounded theory. Four major themes (with associated sub-themes) emerged from our data analysis: learning design (project management, iterative design process, and user-centered design), motivation to complete design (engineering, disabilities, user), perceptions of people with disabilities (previous experience, changed attitudes and beliefs), and multidisciplinary collaboration (etiquette presentation, communication between disciplines, defining roles and expectations). Students completing these projects were shown to appreciate user-centered design, exhibit greater motivation when able to meet and develop a relationship with their client in person, discuss altruistic factors regarding their capstone experience, and were able to develop strong multidisciplinary skills

Senior Capstone Team Formation Based on Project Interest: Team Selection by Students Compared to Team Selection by Instructors

Assigning teams in large courses is logistically challenging and students are sometimes unhappy with their assigned team. This is exacerbated when the project work extends over multiple terms and teams have unique projects. Giving students some agency in team and project selection is one way to improve their project experience. This paper examines two key questions: (a) What is the best way to incorporate student interests into the team-forming process? (b) What impact does the team-forming process have on the student experience throughout the project? We consider two different approaches to giving students agency in the team formation / project selection process that have been implemented in our capstone course. One approach has faculty forming teams outside of class based on student surveys of project interests, skills, time availability, and team preferences. The alternative method enables students to form their own teams in a dynamic faculty-guided setting: Students place nametags on their top project posters, speak with other interested students, and move their nametags as needed until each project had teams with the appropriate size and skillset. Teams formed using these two approaches have completed a full year-long senior design project experience. Throughout these experiences, we collected data to help answer our two key questions. We used student surveys about the experience and the class, peer feedback on team dynamics, focus group discussions, and faculty observations. The results are inconclusive: The differences between the two approaches are small, indicating that either approach could be used to enable student agency in the team-forming process

Studying Underlying Characteristics of Computing and Engineering Student Success (SUCCESS) Survey

This survey was developed to measure underlying factors that may influence student success including personality, community, grit, thriving, identity, mindset, motivation, perceptions of faculty caring, stress, gratitude, self-control, mindfulness, and belongingness. We measure these underlying factors because each engineering and computing student admitted to a university has clear potential for academic and personal success in their undergraduate curriculum based upon admissions criteria. However, while some thrive academically, others struggle in a variety of ways. In our NSF-funded project (1626287/1626185/1626148), we posit that some collection of characteristics—apparently not visible on their admission applications and perhaps not related to their talent or intelligence—is an important piece of the student performance puzzle. We developed a survey to measure various non-cognitive and affective factors that we believe are important for student achievement, academically, personally, and professionally. These non-cognitive and affective factors are representative of multifaceted aspects of undergraduate student success in prior literature. Each of the constructs we chose had validity evidence from prior studies, some within an engineering population. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis have been conducted on the original list of items to develop this finalized survey (Scheidt et al., 2018). The survey takes approximately 30 minutes for students to complete. Scheidt, M., & Godwin, A., & Senkpeil, R. R., & Ge, J. S., & Chen, J., & Self, B. P., & Widmann, J. M., & Berger, E. J. (2018, June), Validity Evidence for the SUCCESS Survey: Measuring Non-Cognitive and Affective Traits of Engineering and Computing Students. Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/3122

Troponin Is Unrelated to Outcomes in Heart Failure Patients Discharged From the Emergency Department

Background: Prior data has demonstrated increased mortality in hospitalized patients with acute heart failure (AHF) and troponin elevation. No data has specifically examined the prognostic significance of troponin elevation in patients with AHF discharged after emergency department (ED) management. Objective: Evaluate the relationship between troponin elevation and outcomes in patients with AHF who are treated and released from the ED. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of the Get with the Guidelines to Reduce Disparities in AHF Patients Discharged from the ED (GUIDED-HF) trial, a randomized, controlled trial of ED patients with AHF who were discharged. Patients with elevated conventional troponin not due to acute coronary syndrome (ACS) were included. Our primary outcome was a composite endpoint: time to 30-day cardiovascular death and/or heart failure-related events. Results: Of the 491 subjects included in the GUIDED-HF trial, 418 had troponin measured during the ED evaluation and 66 (16%) had troponin values above the 99th percentile. Median age was 63 years (interquartile range, 54-70), 62% (n = 261) were male, 63% (n = 265) were Black, and 16% (n = 67) experienced our primary outcome. There were no differences in our primary outcome between those with and without troponin elevation (12/66, 18.1% vs 55/352, 15.6%; P = 0.60). This effect was maintained regardless of assignment to usual care or the intervention arm. In multivariable regression analysis, there was no association between our primary outcome and elevated troponin (hazard ratio, 1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.49-2.01, P = 0.994). Conclusion: If confirmed in a larger cohort, these findings may facilitate safe ED discharge for a group of patients with AHF without ACS when an elevated troponin is the primary reason for admission

A Hybrid Approach to Team-forming for Capstone Design Projects

One of the challenges for capstone design instructors is forming equitable, balanced, and appropriately-skilled student teams to work on projects for a year. For most capstone programs, there are three main parts of this process: identification of projects, presentation of projects to students, and selection of student teams. This paper focuses on the third part: While there is significant useful research about the best ways to form student teams, capstone design team formation has unique aspects that are not directly addressed by much of the prior work. In particular, what is the best approach for team-forming when the participants have similar skills but are deployed to work on very different design challenges? In our capstone course, we recently compared two approaches to team formation: Student-formed and faculty-formed teams. The results of this comparison are reported in a separate paper. This year, informed by these results, we implemented a new hybrid team-forming process designed to retain the student agency resulting from student-formed team while addressing some of the concerns of this approach. This paper summarizes relevant team-forming research and results from our past approaches to forming teams. Then we describe the hybrid approach implemented this year and analyze the preliminary results obtained after one quarter of student teamwork (including student surveys focus groups, and team peer evaluations)