Enhancing students’ motivation to learn software engineering programming techniques: a collaborative and social interaction approach

To motivate students to study advanced programming techniques, including the use of architectural styles such as the model–view–controller pattern, we have con-ducted action research upon a project based-learning approach. In addition to collabo-ration, the approach includes students’ searching and analysis of scientific documents and their involvement in communities of practice outside academia. In this paper, we report the findings of second action research cycle, which took place throughout the fourth semester of a six-semester program. As with the previous cycle during the pre-vious academic year, students did not satisfactorily achieve expected learning out-comes. More groups completed the assigned activities, but results continue to reflect poor engagement in the communities of practice and very low performance in other learning tasks. From the collected data we have identified new approaches and recom-mendations for subsequent research.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, for Ph.D. Grants SFRH/BD/91309/2012 and SFRH/BD/87815/201

Session F2A DEVELOPMENT OF ENGINEERING THERMODYNAMICS CONCEPT INVENTORY INSTRUMENTS

Abstract ⎯ Preliminary instruments for the assessment of undergraduate engineering student understanding of fundamental thermodynamics concept are presented. The Thermodynamics Concept Inventory (TCI) instruments are patterned after the existing Force Concept Inventory (FCI) instruments. Numerous studies have supported the efficacy of pre- and post-course administration of the FCI as a means of assessing the effectiveness of educational reform activities. The objective of the work reported here is to develop similar instruments for the assessment of engineering thermodynamics. Like the FCI, the Thermodynamics Concepts Inventory (TCI) instruments should be brief, require minimal or no computation, should produce repeatable results across broad, diverse student populations, and should succinctly assess studen

Engineering Instructional Services

A study was conducted on the Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles © (ILS) to assess reliability, factor structure, and construct validity as well to determine whether changing its dichotomous response scale to a five-option response scale would improve reliability and validity. Data collected in this study had internal consistency reliability ranging from 0.55 to 0.77 across the four learning style scales of the ILS. Factor analysis revealed that multiple factors were present within three of the learning style scales, which correspond to known aspects of the scale definitions. The factor analysis and direct feedback from students on whether they felt their scores accurately represented their learning preferences provide evidence of construct validity for the ILS. Changing the response scale improved reliability, but it did not change the factor structure substantially nor did it affect the strength of the evidence for construct validity based on student feedback. Key words: learning styles, reliability, validity I

Sooting characteristics of surrogates for jet fuels

Currently, modeling the combustion of aviation fuels, such as JP-8 and JetA, is not feasible due to the complexity and compositional variation of these practical fuels. Surrogate fuel mixtures, composed of a few pure hydrocarbon compounds, are a key step toward modeling the combustion of practical aviation fuels. For the surrogate to simulate the practical fuel, the composition must be designed to reproduce certain pre-designated chemical parameters such as sooting tendency, H/C ratio, autoignition, as well as physical parameters such as boiling range and density. In this study, we focused only on the sooting characteristics based on the Threshold Soot Index (TSI). New measurements of TSI values derived from the smoke point along with other sooting tendency data from the literature have been combined to develop a set of recommended TSI values for pure compounds used to make surrogate mixtures. When formulating the surrogate fuel mixtures, the TSI values of the components are used to predict the TSI of the mixture. To verify the empirical mixture rule for TSI, the TSI values of several binary mixtures of candidate surrogate components were measured. Binary mixtures were also used to derive a TSI for iso-cetane, which had not previously been measured, and to verify the TSI for 1-methylnaphthalene, which had a low smoke point and large relative uncertainty as a pure compound. Lastly, surrogate mixtures containing three components were tested to see how well the measured TSI values matched the predicted values, and to demonstrate that a target value for TSI can be maintained using various components, while also holding the H/C ratio constant. © 2010 The Combustion Institute