Papers and Abstracts

 

An engineering program with multiple disciplinary degree offerings at a smaller school often requires a core course such as circuits with a multidisciplinary range of students. A previous paper addressed the rationale of combining digital with analog circuits in a one-semester first course for the multidisciplinary audience, an educational innovation that we have successfully implemented for several years now with the support of a custom text. Other techniques that further improve teaching and learning with student diversity include active, cooperative and inductive strategies (Felder & Brent). This paper presents five years of results by introductory multidisciplinary circuits students on the Determining and Interpreting Resistive Electric circuits Concept Test (DIRECT by Engelhardt, et al.) as a pre- and post-test diagnostic of learning. This has been administered in conjunction with the Circuit Tutor online tool (Skromme) as an active learning supplement to homework and lectures. The most and least learned analog circuits concepts at this introductory level will be discussed. Besides the Circuit Tutor tool, additional examples will be provided to illustrate methods of enhancing engagement with student diversity by varying the presentation mode, such as 1) graphically highlighted applications at the start of class to introduce new material, 2) demonstrations to clarify and emphasize key issues, 3) concept questions to stimulate student inquiry and diagnose understanding, 4) incentivized homework collaboration, 5) enhanced homework problem context adapted to engineering disciplines in the class and 6) improvised lab strategies. This paper will provide results from the authors experience, include some work in progress, and recommend future work needed to benefit engineering educators who face similar multidisciplinary challenges.

 

 

This paper discusses the development and integration of immersive 360-videos in surveying engineering education. Surveying engineering is a major taught in few accredited universities in the United States. Education of surveying students requires an extensive number of laboratories (indoor and outdoor). Outdoor laboratories are used to develop skills with surveying instruments, teach field techniques, and reinforce concepts taught in lectures. Time allotted for field work is usually three hours. Instructors use a considerable portion of the allotted time on providing an overview of the lab, which reduces the time students can spend on the field conducting the lab. In addition, it is often difficult for students to imagine the tasks that will have to conduct outside, which reduces their preparedness for the lab. This is because in outdoor labs students from one location to another to collect data related to each task. During the lab students have questions, but it is difficult for the instructor to assist all groups in a timely manner as groups work on differential locations of the campus. In some situations, students hesitate to ask questions, which leads to mistakes and frustration. These create unique instructional challenges making outdoor laboratories an unpleasant experience for students. This is especially important for first-year students as they are first introduced into surveying instruments and field techniques and practices. To address these challenges, we created a multi-disciplinary team consisting of telecommunication, computer science, and engineering students and faculty to create instructional 360-videos. The videos replicate the outdoor lab and they are used to prepare students for the physical implementation. The videos are also available during the lab (through the course management system) to answer any student questions that might arise. The 360 version allow for student immersion and giving the impression that students are outside conducting the lab, allowing them to better comprehend lab procedures. Therefore, the developed 360-videos follow an experiential learning pedagogical approach, where students learn through experiencing the labs. Assessment of 360-video effectiveness is measured through anonymous student surveys and results are provided. Student surveys show the effectiveness of 360-videos to (i) help them understand surveying methods and techniques, (ii) how to operate surveying equipment, and (iii) help them prepare for the physical lab. The paper also discusses the implementation and assessment of 360-videos in surveying students, discusses the technical aspects of creating the 360-videos, and the collaboration challenges and successes of the multi-disciplinary team.

 

 

Studies by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch predicted that the space industry will be worth $1.1-2.7 trillion by the end of 2040. The rapidly growing space industry has stimulated a demand for experiences in learning design, simulation, and testing techniques to develop the more efficient liquid rocket engines. This has triggered the current trend in the research and development of rocket engines with increasing numbers of universities participating in student rocketry challenge across the USA. There are many university clubs (e.g., Cornell Rocketry Team, MIT Rocket Team, Portland State Aerospace Space Society, SEDS at US San Diego, etc.) in the nation. However, there was no such a rocketry program at any HBCU among more than 100 HBCUs in the country until last year that Morgan State University (MSU) was awarded an HBCU space challenge grant by BASE 11 to develop the first rocketry program at an HBCU. The rocketry program at MSU just officially started in January 2020 and this study is one of the projects related to the rocketry program. The objective is to involve the concepts of the multi-disciplinary engineering education that prepares students to work effectively with others from outside of their major disciplines and help to develop the first liquid rocket by minority students among the HBCUs. The study also involved studying the team structures among existing rocket teams at several universities in order to learn from their wealth of experience; understanding key skills and tools for designing and manufacturing of liquid rocket engine, and identifying the courses for developing aerospace and rocket program which cuts across the science and engineering majors. Collected data from this study will be analyzed and used to develop a rocketry program. Results and findings from this study will engage more multidisciplinary minority students in the Aerospace Program at Morgan State University.

 

 

For the past decade, undergraduate research programs have been successful vehicles for retaining students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The experience of working closely with a faculty mentor and being scientifically trained have shown to benefit STEM students academically, particularly so for first-generation STEM students. These first-generation STEM college students are the first in their families to pursue postsecondary degrees, and they are currently an untapped group that has the potential to diversify and increase the engineering and scientific workforce. This study examines the impact of a nine-week summer geoscience research program for undergraduates in engineering-related majors. Self-reported pre-and post-surveys were collected from 2014-2018. The survey focused on the following areas: 1) Research Expectations; 2) Experience, Knowledge, and Ability; 3) Exposure to Research, and 4) Future Goals. There were 49 undergraduates who participated in the study. Descriptive statistics, paired-sample t-tests, and independent t-tests were used to analyze the survey responses between first-generation and non-first-generation college students. Results showed that for first-generation college students, the summer research experience increased their confidence and their knowledge of research methods; it increased their ability: to evaluate the quality of a research study, to discuss research findings, to present research findings, and to design a research poster. Moreover, first-generation college students were more confident in their ability to prepare an application to graduate school. The program also afforded the first-generation college students opportunities to participate and present their research findings at professional conference, and although they found the geoscience research experience challenging, they also found it to be enjoyable.

 

 

First-semester, first-year engineering students at a mid-sized, Mid-Atlantic public university are required to take a multidisciplinary introduction to engineering course that is offered in sections of 20-24 students. Approximately ⅓ of these students are members of the Engineering Learning Community (ELC), which provides housing in a common location as well as additional supports in the form of weekly group meetings with a student mentor and access to tutoring. Another ⅙ of students were in sections designated as Honors. In Fall 2017, weekly reflections were implemented in this course as a way of encouraging students to explain past experiences and learn from their mistakes. In Fall 2018, the weekly reflection prompts were reduced to biweekly reflections, the first and last of which required students to reflect on themselves as learners. This study used provisional and in-vivo coding to analyze paired reflections from 116 students. Ten total themes were identified and used to characterize each reflection, with interrater reliabilities (quantified by Cohen’s Kappa) of 0.564 and 0.668 for the two pairs of researchers who analyzed this data. The top three themes for each group of students (ELC, Honors, and Non-Honors & Non-ELC) were determined and the representation of this data discussed. Results showed for the beginning of the semester, “Learning” was the top theme for all three groups of students. At the end of the semester, the top theme for all groups was “Time Management Balance”. Through this study, the change of students’ perceptions of themselves as learners at the beginning and end of their first semester was analyzed and is illustrated by, among other things, the change in the top theme highlighted above.

 

 

Engineering is often a competition between multidisciplinary teams who use interdisciplinary engineering analysis, simulation, and hands-on construction to address a problem that has multiple valid solutions. It can be a struggle to emulate this environment in the classroom, especially when students have only rudimentary knowledge of engineering subjects. One potential vehicle to introduce students to realistic engineering challenges is a survey course for pre-college or first-year students. In this paper we discuss a pre-college engineering survey course with particular emphasis on its spaghetti bridge competition, a project that introduces students to materials science, statics, error analysis, simulation, engineering design, and gives them experience working on a team.

Every year hundreds of students devote 20 days of their summer break to learn more about engineering. They complete lab activities in civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical, and materials engineering. They also prepare a presentation in response to a request for proposal, learn about engineering finance, debate engineering ethics, take weekly quizzes, and complete a comprehensive final exam. They participate in a course that has served 4,651 students since its inception in 2006 and 1,073 students in the last two years alone. The core project they complete is a competition to build a bridge that can support the largest mid-span load after accounting for weight and size penalties. The bridge must span 50 centimeters, weigh less than 250 grams, and have a height less than 25 centimeters. The strongest bridges often hold more than 40 kilograms, but teams receive full credit for bridges that hold 3 kg. To accomplish this feat, students experimentally determine material properties of spaghetti, use a virtual lab to design a truss, and prototype and build their bridges to test on the final day of the course.

This paper discusses the implementation and outcomes of the spaghetti bridge competition and its role within the pre-college survey course. Based on survey results from an external evaluator, the course significantly increases students’ understanding of the variety of work that engineers perform. Students also report increased confidence in their ability to evaluate problems they have never seen before and design and build a structure without a detailed plan. Importantly, they also report that they are more confident about being in a diverse, multicultural group of people. Overall, the project serves its purpose of introducing students to interdisciplinary engineering concepts.

 

Engineering design problems are intricate in nature and require not only skills that involve interdisciplinary education but also knowledge across disciplines. The most recent ABET general criteria states that engineering curricula must include a culminating major engineering design experience that incorporates appropriate engineering standards and multiple constraints. The criteria also define a team as one that is working toward a common goal and should include individuals of diverse backgrounds, skills, or perspectives. As a result, multi-disciplinary teams that address real-world complex problems are increasingly emphasized in capstone engineering courses. To promote and encourage multi-disciplinary projects, the School of Science, Engineering, and Technology at Penn State Harrisburg has developed a model that facilitates the formation of multidisciplinary teams to work on industry-sponsored capstone projects. These projects offer students invaluable educational benefits and help in preparing them for their future careers. As we move forward, our goal is to intensify our efforts to strengthen our relationship with industry and the community. The more we strengthen these relationships, the better we are able to provide our students with opportunities that allow them to increase their technical knowledge and improve their social and interpersonal skills through working with individuals of diverse backgrounds and experiences. The paper will provide details about our approach to seek industry-sponsored projects and the process we follow to encourage students to become part of multi-disciplinary teams that work on such projects. The paper will also summarize challenges and share relevant information about the supervision and evaluation of team members and their final presentation and report.

 

 

With computing impacting most every professional field, it has become essential to provide pathways for students other than those majoring in computer science to acquire computing knowledge and skills. Virtually all employers and graduate and professional schools seek these skills in their employees or students, regardless of discipline. Academia currently leans towards approaches such as double majors or combined majors between computer science and other non-CS disciplines, commonly referred to as “CS+X” programs. These programs tend to require rigorous courses gleaned from the institutions’ courses for computer science majors. Thus, they may not meet the needs of majors in disciplines such as the social and biological sciences, humanities, and others.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is taking an approach more suitably termed “X+CS” to fulfill the computing needs of non-CS majors. As part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, we are developing a “computing” minor specifically to meet their needs. To date, we have piloted the first two of the minor’s approximately six courses. The first is a variation on the existing Computer Science I course required for majors but restricted to non-majors. Both versions of the course use the Python language and cover the same programming content, but with the non-majors assigned projects with relevance to non-CS disciplines. We use the same student assessment measures of homework, projects, and examinations for both courses. After four semesters, results show that non-CS majors perform comparably to majors. Students also express increased interest in computing and satisfaction with being part of a non-CS major cohort.

The second course was piloted in fall 2019. It is a new course intended to enhance and hone programming skills and introduce topics such as web scraping, HTML and CSS, web application development, data formats, and database use. Students again express increased interest in computing and were already beginning to apply the computing skills that they were learning to their non-CS courses.

As a welcome side effect, we experienced a significant increase in the number of women and under-represented minorities (URMs) in these two courses when compared with CS-major-specific courses. Overall, women comprised 52% of the population, with URMs following a similar upward trend.

We are currently developing the third course in the computing minor and exploring options for the remaining three. Possibilities include electives from our Information Systems major. We will also be working with our science, social science, and humanities departments to utilize existing courses in those disciplines that apply computing. The student response that we have received thus far provides us with evidence that our computing minor will be popular among UMBC’s non-CS population, providing them with a more suitable and positive computing education than existing CS+X efforts.

Engineering educators are constantly looking for innovative methods for introducing engineering fundamentals and careers to college students and K-12 educators. AN NSF funded project titled ” Algae Grows the Future” was developed to expose engineering concepts and careers. Cost effective hands on experiments to teach engineering principles and emphasize the link between engineering and humanities were developed. Algae experiments were developed to demonstrate various engineering disciplines such as Biomedical, Civil, Mechanical, and Chemical. A virtual game titled “Algae City” and a real live streaming of an algae reactor was also developed to promote the project. The project was integrated in a First year engineering course in six sections. It was also introduced at the local middle schools. Results indicate that the use of algae can impact students enthusiasm for engineering careers and learning of fundamental concepts.

 

Since 2000 we have seen a 75% increase in the total number of undergraduates in our Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) program. In addition to this significant growth, we also observed a shift in post-graduation destinations, with a decreasing number going straight into PhD programs or professional school (65% in 2010, 30% in 2018) and more looking for industry options (12% in 2010, 50% in 2018). While the student:faculty ratio remains favorable at approximately 1:5, the rise in enrolment and shift in postgraduate destination required us to consider changes to our capstone Senior Design options. In order to better prepare our students for the workplace and enhance their educational experience, we introduced longitudinal design teams into our curriculum 5 years ago. Our teams allow MSE seniors to conduct a yearlong design project in a team setting in lieu of the standard research-based senior design option. In addition, the teams engage MSE freshmen and sophomores to develop problem solving skills while providing longitudinal teaching experience to MSE seniors and juniors. Perhaps the most interesting and unintended outcome has been to watch students from other programs seek out our MSE teams and join them, thus forming longitudinal, multi-disciplinary teams. We have had 16 design teams since Fall 2015 (5 academic years). Of those 16 teams, 4 were multi-year projects where team-leadership was passed from a senior to a junior. In all, 67 of our undergraduate students have been on a design team at some point during their time in the program, and many have multiple semesters of DT experience. Our three teams this academic year are composed of 4 seniors, 5 juniors, 3 sophomores and 3 freshmen representing Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical, Environmental & Health, and Biomedical Engineering. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: improved planning and communication skills, ability to empathize, conflict resolution, mentoring skills, and idea generation are all aspects of being on a multi-level, multi-disciplinary design team that the students value. In this paper, I will describe (i) how we implemented the change to our traditional senior capstone course and (ii) how our students have benefited from having the option to join a design team from the time they show up as freshmen through to their senior year.

 

 

Technical Entrepreneurship (TE) Week is an academic immersion halfway through the M. Eng. in Technical Entrepreneurship degree program at Lehigh University. Multi-disciplinary student teams, including those with undergraduate degrees in engineering, business, science and the arts, simulate start-up companies that are in the hunt for a technology to license from a university. Throughout the week, each team focuses on one technology that was invented at Lehigh, is either patent pending or has an issued patent, and is available to license through the Lehigh Office of Technology Transfer (OTT).

Through daily assignments, a team explores (multiple) commercial applications of the core technology, develops an initial commercialization plan, creates early-stage mock-ups, and negotiates a simulated term sheet with OTT. Students meet with faculty inventors, while receiving guidance from the degree program faculty. The learning is enhanced via class sessions on intellectual property, team dynamics, and technology commercialization. At the end of the week, each team presents their work geared towards solidifying the faculty inventor and OTT as key partners.

TE Week provides educational impact on a few different levels. Students are exposed to the rich portfolio of patented technologies available at a university. Students are provided a framework through which they apply the knowledge and skills developed in the first half of the master’s program, reinforcing their learning. And students, presented with a brand new and complex challenge in a team environment, realize their ability to complete a work product with significant breadth and depth.

We know that data collection, use, and ethics are becoming increasingly important as organizations amass more data to improve operations and profitability, and so, it’s becoming increasingly important that students—and the workforce in general—understand how to use, analyze, and talk about data. However, we also know that jobs centering around data analytics and machine learning may be at risk as advances in Artificial Intelligence continue to expand and take over some of these exploratory data-intensive positions, which makes it more important that students today learn skills built on top of the pure analytics and metric calculations—what do resulting numbers and trends mean for an organization and how can we adjust operations and human-interactions to improve upon the current state and mitigate risks? In newly developed introductory Business Analytics and Decision Analytics courses, students explore the depth of data-centered, real-world challenges by working in multidisciplinary teams with local government to develop solutions for their business operations and presenting their work to local government stakeholders.

Using a revised Bloom’s taxonomy structure, students quickly build on lower tiers of understanding and analyzing datasets and metrics and focus on creating proposals for public and private organizations through open and proprietary data-related in-class and assigned projects. Courses emphasize how students can take ownership of their communities with city, state, and federal open data, which allows students to better understand what is happening in their city and work with real data that’s rife with errors, inconsistencies, and unclear organization—representative of most data they’ll need to work with in their careers. Students also work on course capstone projects with local city government departments, in which students work to scope, analyze, and develop recommendations to help with a data-related business problems proposed by city government that would otherwise be assigned to internal staff if they had the capacity for an analytics team. This allows students to act as business analysts and data consultants for local government, better understand why business analytics skills are important and relevant in real-world operations, and to see how potential future employers and businesses use and think about data.

This course model provides a roadmap for other technical educators to build partnerships with local government so that students can learn how their work contributes to making a positive impact in society and in the workforce, and to aid in the success of an academic institution’s surrounding communities and local government.

 

Technology and globalization have created a world of complex problems that require complex solutions. Due to this complexity, engineering students are inheriting a future that will require them to work on teams with engineers from a range of disciplines, scientists, and other non-engineers. Our research explores whether, in addition to traditional teamwork skills, there are skills specific to working effectively on multidisciplinary engineering teams. Our goal is to better prepare students to enter the modern workforce and accelerate their ability to deliver meaningful impacts.

To determine whether there are skills specific to working effectively on multidisciplinary engineering teams, we employed three stages of research: a literature review, stakeholder interviews, and a survey. The literature review confirmed the existence of multidisciplinary skills while suggesting the need for increased industry perspective. We then formulated open-ended questions based on the literature review to interview working engineers and developed a survey for professionals supervising or working on multidisciplinary teams that contained at least one engineer. Finally, we administered the survey to 156 professionals who met our screening criteria to evaluate skills specific to working on multidisciplinary engineering teams.

The interviews of professional engineers revealed the existence of seven key skills specific to working on effective multidisciplinary engineering teams. The importance of these skills was confirmed by the subsequent survey, and it was further revealed that respondents believed that the majority of entry-level engineering hires are not proficient in these core multidisciplinary skills at date of hire. The results suggest several opportunities for future research, starting with a more in-depth analysis of the information collected filtered through key demographics, such as company size, years of experience, gender, and managerial responsibilities, and expanding to inquiries related to skill development and hiring practices. As engineering educators, it is our hope to uncover and develop approaches that will better prepare our students to enter the modern workforce and develop meaningful solutions through multidisciplinary collaboration.

In this presentation we will discuss the challenges of managing a multidisciplinary undergraduate research team. We will describe the process of creating an immersive technology laboratory and bringing together a team of students from a diverse set of majors such as surveying engineering, computer science, information sciences and technology, communications, and business as well as those minoring in game development to conduct undergraduate engineering education research. We will focus on the process of taking students who are accustomed to being grouped in silos by disciplines and bringing them together to form a cohesive team. We will use two projects from the immersive technology lab as examples to showcase what was effective and what we would do differently. The first project was a virtual reality application and required students with skills in programming, modeling, point-cloud data collection, game development, and data storage. The second project involved creating 360-degree immersive videos and required skills in video acquisition, video editing, communications, and video distribution. Neither project would have been successful if it wasn’t for the diversity and collaboration of the team. Our presentation will talk about the technical tools we use such as a project management application, code repositories, and shared storage but will focus on how these tools fostered collaboration and innovation. We will present information about the impact this project had on 12 students in terms of skills developed, research, and employment. Finally, we will discuss the future of the project and the effect peer mentoring has had on transitioning from one generation of students to the next while efficiently transferring knowledge and skills.

 

 

The nation has a need to increase the number of students pursuing degrees in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and those leading to transportation related careers. Population trends indicate a growth in populations which have been long underrepresented in the transportation field. In order to meet the demand for qualified graduates in transportation, it is necessary to diversify the pool of students entering college with an interest in these fields. The National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) is an educational initiative developed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Department of Transportation (DOT). The NSTI at College X was designed to increase awareness of transportation related careers to New York City high school students. The structure of College X’s NSTI includes lectures, field trips, projects and laboratory activities which promote the growth of each participant and strengthen their academic and social skills. The academic components are designed to reinforce the mathematics and science skills of the high school participants, to stimulate their interest in the various modes of transportation, and to expose them to new opportunities through various forms of learning. The engineering based curriculum is supplemented by seminars to deigned to support critical thinking, problem solving, computer literacy, communication skills, and time management. This NSTI program provides a model for broadening participation in STEM and build America’s civil engineering workforce.

 

As with any other profession, there are certain stereotypes and myths inherent to civil engineering (CE). Most people associate the field with dealing with semiskilled/unskilled labors and working in harsh conditions amidst bricks, concrete and other construction materials. Students seeking college admission and the majority of CE undergraduates perceive the field as not having the cachet of other seemingly more lucrative fields (e.g. computer science, bioengineering), in turn deterring them from pursuing it. This misconception is compounded by the paucity of opportunities that traditional CE curricula offer to students to synthesize their prior technical skills with other engineering and science fields toward addressing practical problems and 21st-century grand challenges. This working paper portrays an outlook for the future CE, highlights its unconventional elements and features the skills required for students to contribute to and grow in it. It then provides an overview of the course Civil Engineering Software and Design as a required course for freshman CE majors at Howard University and outlines the relevance and application of the interdisciplinary software and skills that are taught in it to the forthcoming courses and how they contribute to preparing the students for future CE. The skills are intra-/interdisciplinary and include machine learning, size/shape/topology optimization, big data analysis and computational modeling and simulation, among others. The theme and type of the research (inquiry-based) projects that the students are required to carry out using the learned skills are provided and their impact on instilling a probabilistic design mindset in the students is discussed. Finally, the influence of such an early engagement of students in developing these skills and course-based research in their performance in the subsequent college years are quantified and analyzed.

 

Students attending a primarily undergraduate liberal arts university take a first year seminar program that connects two academic courses across a theme. The program, Messina, also provides various transition support and student development opportunities in an extra scheduled enrichment hour of class time. This report focuses on the initial attempts to implement an integrated learning experience for these students. In the 2018-2019 academic year approximately 32 students were in a course pairing of Introduction to Engineering and Introduction to Psychology. This pairing was under a thematic title of ‘Visionary’. The authors decided to cross disciplines and classroom boundaries by initiating a pro-social app project. Sixteen students were in a section of Introduction to Engineering in the fall and then Introduction to Psychology in the spring and another group of 16 took the same courses with the same instructors in the opposite order. Therefore one group of 16 was exposed to psychology first and one to engineering first. Each group of 16 was further divided into four groups of four and asked to collaborate on a team project storyboarding an app with pro-social intentions. The goal was to have both groups be able to provide an oral presentation of their app designs. They were to answer the questions of engineering ideation and design about user needs, design criteria and objectives, and developing specifications and prototypes from that process.