Search

Virtual reality (VR) is gaining popularity in a variety of fields, including gaming, driving, training for the aviation and medicine. The hopeful and encouraging role that virtual reality (VR) can play in engineering programs is the main topic of this study. Numerous manufacturing methods have seen fast development and innovation, particularly in laser processing, additive manufacturing, and printed electronics. These discoveries show how Industry 4.0 technology can be used to create smart, fully automated manufacture of products that is supervised and controlled by robots and computers. Engineering students need to be trained and equipped for the next generation of computerized equipment in order to comprehend and design such systems, which may not be available in every educational setting. The biomedical and aerospace industries can develop customized, one-of-a-kind items using Additive Manufacturing (AM) because of its exceptional capacity to produce parts with complicated geometry. In addition to processing materials that are difficult for machines to process, such as titanium, nitinol, and magnesium alloys, flexible designs can be utilized. However, due to its high initial cost, high running skill requirements, and access challenges brought on by health and safety standards, additive manufacturing (AM) is not a common manufacturing method in the education of engineering students. This paper describes the use of a VR lab to address this issue and give the students access to a VR-based accelerated manufacturing lab where they may experience the whole build process and complete assignments quickly and, most importantly, safely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education has moved to various online platforms in recent years, with virtual classes established following national norms during the COVID-19 pandemic and wartimes in Ukraine. Early engineering education, namely teaching ESP, is directly related to the development of soft skills like time management, teamwork, creative thinking, and digital literacy as well as practical talents like sketching, computer graphics, mechanism projecting, etc. This study examines qualitative data collected from second-year engineering students at the Higher Educational Institution “Podillia State University”, Ukraine. The paper is based on instructors’ thoughtful observations of instruction in both times of war and the COVID-19 pandemic. The research conclusions offer some important things to think about when assessing the virtual classroom long-term effects on language education and second-year study techniques. The results of this study showed that the use of technology in second-year engineering education, namely the TED Talks application, promoted creative teaching strategies, increased digital literacy, and improved teamwork. Even if online learning achieved its learning goals, there were drawbacks, such as social isolation and low motivation. The study highlights the value of looking at virtual language studios and integrating technology in early engineering education, providing chances for future research and curriculum development. These results are pertinent to educators worldwide who instruct second-year mechanical engineering students in ESP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerospace engineering students frequently encounter difficulty in their upper division courses because the course material is not only advanced but strongly specific to aerospace technical details, compared to the general engineering content of the lower division courses. Consequently students must learn many concepts and analysis techniques which are new to them. The objective of the work described in this paper is to improve student understanding and mastery and retention of specific technical theories, concepts, and methods as defined by specific ABET outcomes. The approach is to develop a series of Khan Academy style videos which are specific to aerospace engineering topics which students historically find challenging to understand and master. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the final year of the project, CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development (NSF EEC 1554057). Engineering has a history of attracting and graduating look-a-like and think-a-like engineers. Those who look or think like a "stereotypical engineer" may feel more welcome in engineering and may be why engineering has attracted and graduated similar students. This research project considered the unique ways of being, thinking, and knowing--what we call latent diversity--that can be highlighted and valued. Students' latent diversity may or may not align with the values in engineering education that focus on a social/technical dualism, meritocracy, and rigor, which are built-in Whiteness and masculinity. Students, particularly minoritized students (i.e., women, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students), may feel pushed out of engineering or they may feel the need to conform to these values to fit in. These messages create an engineering education that limits who can be an engineer as well as how these engineers are prepared to solve complex engineering problems. In this paper, we use an example of one student, John, and how he navigated his experiences through engineering over four years. We discuss how key themes of mental health and neurodiversity intersect with his identity development as an engineer over time as well as overlap and were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use this rich, single case as an example of how the mixed methods research in this study provides a nuanced understanding of students' trajectories in engineering. We also discuss the implications of this work for inclusive teaching and provide connections to existing resources and tools developed from the research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the preliminary results of an NSF project funded through the Directorate for Engineering, Engineering Education and Centers. One of the main project goals is developing an understanding of the factors that support or inhibit engineering faculty technology acceptance. As essential gatekeepers in the process of the formation of engineers, engineering faculty determine which technologies engineering students learn and adopt during their engineering studies. Faculty members' ability to adopt new and relevant engineering technologies directly affects the relevance of engineering graduates' technical skills. Additionally, by adopting and teaching new and relevant technologies, engineering faculty model life-long technology adoption to their students. Technology acceptance has been widely studied and modeled by information systems researchers. The most widely used model in educational settings is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [1] and its revision, the TAM2 [2]. These models are general, however, and not specific to engineering faculty. There is thus a need for qualitative research to determine facilitating conditions to support engineering faculty's technology acceptance. This qualitative study involved interviewing engineering faculty at a Midwestern US University. Transcripts were coded leveraging analytic induction methods [3, 4]. This paper and the associated poster will discuss the facilitating conditions for engineering faculty members' adoption of new technologies that have been identified within the study. Factors that are emerging from the data include peers, mentors, and students; digital learning resources; time; non-digital learning resources; and formal training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Asian American students in higher education were faced not only with the move to online learning but the nuances that came with anti-Asian rhetoric and violence in the news. We wanted to understand how the sociopolitical effects of the past two years have affected Asian American engineering students through their experiences in the online setting, as well as highlight the gaps of Asian American engineering students in engineering education research. Using qualitative methods through semi-structured interviews with Asian and Asian American engineering students, we explore Asian and Asian American identity, and sociopolitical matters in the engineering classroom. To understand the views of Asian and Asian American students, we lay out the ways that racial and ethnic identity have been examined in engineering, along with Asian and Asian American identity formation. In this paper, we explore the background of race and equality in engineering and engineering education. Then we look at the results of our interviews, focusing on two main areas. First we look at how students formed social networks and build their identities in these online spaces. Then we look at the role of politicization in the classroom and in engineering and how it relates to Asian identity formation. We close this paper by speculating how Asian and Asian American identity can be better addressed and attended to within engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education systems limit access to engineering education for disabled and neurodivergent engineering students. Throughout this paper we will discuss ableism in higher education systems. Particularly, U.S. institutions and education are designed for non-disabled and neurotypical people rather than with accessibility for all despite legal efforts to improve access to education. We also provide two narratives from the authors that describe their experiences with having a disability and being neurodivergent in engineering education. Finally, we suggest other paradigms and methodologies engineering education researchers can utilize when conducting research on disability and neurodivergence in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of engineering as presented through one class at one university. While this paper is a work-in-progress, it represents a window into a practice of engineering that differs from much of the standard engineering practice in the United States. To a large degree, standard engineering in the United States is beholden to the interests of corporate capitalism and the military. Most engineers are employed in industry, and much of the focus of engineering career centers is on aiding students in getting employment in for-profit engineering firms, industry, government, or research institutions. While standard engineering practice has led to the rise of the tech sector and the proliferation of technology, the benefits have gone, disproportionately, to the richest few. The interests of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized and vulnerable communities feature much less in the practice of standard engineering. Additionally, engineering jobs and engineering education tend to be environments which are not welcoming to people who are not white, American, cishet men who embrace capitalist economics. For those who are already pushed to the margins in their everyday lives, the very nature of standard engineering, from education to implementation, has a tendency to exclude. Rather than accept the standard practice, we recognize the need for an alternative approach to engineering. We are presenting an alternative approach which we call Solidarity Engineering. Solidarity Engineering involves a partnership in which all involved -- community partners, professional engineers, faculty, students, and other participants -- engage, democratically, as equally valued participants. It is neither transactional nor product driven. Through a collaborative process, participants work together to identify problems, develop solutions, and implement these solutions. Solidarity Engineering includes the use of approaches that are not traditionally part of the engineering process as it is currently taught. As a case study, this paper focuses on a class offered as a service-learning class for engineering students. Through the class, participants engaged in Solidarity Engineering as well as critical theories relevant to the community-based contexts in which they were operating. A fundamental pillar of the class was a Pedagogy of Love, which is a non-hierarchical approach to teaching and learning that places equal value on the contributions of students, faculty, and community partners. The Pedagogy of Love is rooted in the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, and is founded on the understanding that students and community members have perspectives and ideas that faculty do not have access to. Basic pillars of the Pedagogy of Love include respect and trust for one another, understanding and patience on all ends, and the building of lasting relationships over short-term ones. The class was formed under institutional constraints, without institutional funding, and was developed organically, with successes as well as failures; which is to say, the class is not intended to represent a perfect model. Rather, the value in this paper is in providing an example of Solidarity Engineering, and in providing an example of how a Pedagogy of Love can be used in post-secondary level education. The hope is that Solidarity Engineering, with a Pedagogy of Love, can help guide transformative change that brings about more inclusive engineering that meets the interests of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized and vulnerable communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An educators' job is to prepare students to work with the latest technology. In the last decade, there has been an increase in the use of deep learning in many applications including self-driving cars and virtual assistants. This paper discusses the teaching of the fundamentals of deep learning in an undergraduate microcontroller which used the TI - RSLK MAX robot which is based on an ARMbased MSP432 microcontroller. In the course, a new concept of deep learning was introduced each week and included hands-on activities. The deep learning portion of the course culminated with a project in which the students were assigned to use deep learning in a line follower robot. In this paper, the students are co-authors and they provided data about their robots. This data was used to assess the effectiveness of the deep learning curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and teaching are two crucial aspects of faculty responsibilities for some Engineering Technology and Multidisciplinary Engineering Programs. It would be worth discussing how faculty can manage a research project and engage with students through capstone projects. As a case study, a building structural analysis project is presented in this paper. This building structural analysis project can be broken down to several components. One of the subcomponents is a quadcopter platform, and the other one is an underwater robot platform for a building analysis. These two components were managed as two capstone projects. Two capstone projects were carried out as a part of this building structural analysis research project at Texas A&M University. The first capstone team designed and built a custom quadcopter that could fly close to the building to find potential damage to the building. The second capstone team designed and built an underwater robot to inspect the portion of a building structures that are submerged such as bridges. For this multidisciplinary project, three faculty members from two departments of Engineering Technology and Construction Science formed a team and advised the students. The Engineering Technology department at Texas A&M University has an Electronics Systems Engineering Technology (ESET) program and Multidisciplinary Engineering Technology (MXET) program. For the second capstone project team, students have created an underwater robot for a building analysis. These four students are from the Multidisciplinary Engineering Technology (MXET) program. This second capstone started in Fall 2020, and it was concluded in Spring 2021. In this paper, the details of the second capstone project will be provided. Moreover, the details of the integration of the two capstone projects will be introduced and discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work in Progress paper will describe a structure for online projects and a team formation process to address some of the challenges in implementing design projects for teams of online students. These challenges include time zone differences, scheduling constraints for virtual meetings, varying levels of backgrounds and motivation, and team membership changes due to students withdrawing from class. In an attempt to address these challenges in the online Introduction to Engineering course, offered at Arizona State University, a 'robotic swarm project' was developed and implemented, which involves each team member designing an individual mobile robot with a specific function and the team coordinating their robots together to accomplish a collective task of their choice. This project balances team collaboration and coordination with individual responsibilities and its modular nature also makes it easy to implement for team members not located in the same place or time zone. In this paper, the details of this project and how it helps overcome the online teamwork challenges will be discussed. We will also describe a team formation process, where students are allowed to select their own teams and have control over the membership as the project progresses. Plans for future work to assess the efficacy of this project structure and team formation process will be discussed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work in Progress Paper presents techniques adapted to teach first-year engineering courses post-pandemic. Challenges faced by students and faculty will also be presented in this paper along with some guidance and best practices. In March 2020, COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic that began impacting higher education during the Spring semester. Many land-grant universities were not fully equipped with the tools to offer the best learning experience to students due to lock-down and the inability to access the laboratories and teaching equipment. This global pandemic had caused the universities to change their operations and impelled instructors to switch to online instruction halfway into the semester. Many universities began exploring options and investing their resources to devise teaching pedagogies that best fit the needs of their students. Although universities had been utilizing some learning management systems such as Blackboard, D2L, Canvas, etc., an unanticipated need for online instruction impelled a mandated use of these learning management systems for full content delivery. Although engineering courses could easily be revamped to distance learning platforms, there were some challenges due to the nature of the coursework and assessment of outcomes. Adhering to the social distancing guidelines and university mask mandates along with the availability of vaccination have made it possible to return to in-person teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to: a) present some of the challenges faced by the first-year engineering students during the transition to and from distance learning approaches, b) share some of the results from the assessment of student attitudes during this transition, and c) share some of the best practices adopted by the instructors during these uncertain times. The first-year engineering curriculum usually involves fundamental concepts and provides an opportunity for students to explore several engineering disciplines. In a normal learning environment, engineering courses tend to be challenging due to higher expectations for problemsolving, mathematics, and scientific concepts, and adding external factors such as the pandemic adds more complications. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, students and instructors have been under constant pressure to satisfy the basic requirements of attaining student learning objectives. In this process of attaining the objectives, several challenges had been encountered and overcome in different ways. The focus of this research work is to study the first-year engineering course and present the challenges associated with the delivery of the course content, teaching engineering concepts and applications in a remote setting, and communication between instructors and students during the lock-down period. This paper also presents some of the teaching strategies that have been investigated by the instructors to assist students during difficult times while balancing student expectations. This work in progress study was initiated in Spring 2020 at a small regional campus of The Ohio State University. Challenges arising due to the transition to and from distance learning modalities were observed in the first-year engineering courses, Fundamentals of Engineering I and Fundamentals of Engineering II. These courses are two-credit hours each and introduce engineering problem-solving, data analysis, project-based learning, computer programming, 3-D Modeling and simulation, project management, and teamwork. Teaching strategies adopted by the instructors including restructuring the course, revisioning the assessment of course goals, and utilizing alternative approaches to assess student performance will be discussed in this paper. The findings of this paper will provide an opportunity for educators to learn from the unique experience and develop strategies to address the continuously changing teaching and learning environments that have evolved as a result of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the best practices and lessons learned from organizing an effective remote REU Site during COVID-19. Our REU Site is a three-year program that is designed to offer closely-mentored summer research experience to a cohort of ten students in each of the three years. COVID-19 has disrupted our site by forcing us to split our second cohort to two groups, two students in summer 2020 and seven students in summer 2021. However, the experience that we gained in summer 2020 by mentoring the two students virtually online has provided us with the confidence that a virtual REU Site with a larger group can be as effective as in person and on campus. To further improve the quality of our REU Site in the on-line mode, we have applied multiple novel practices. Specifically, before the start of the 2021 REU site we as the site co-directors proactively worked with mentors to better understand the needs of the defined research projects. Subsequently, we tailored the topics covered by the crash course of our site to the needs of the research projects as well as purposefully increasing active learning activities and student interactions. In lieu of the previous in-person bond building activity (a two-day high rope course in a nearby camp), we added virtual scavenger image hunt in orientation and game nights every Wednesday. During the ten weeks, we also organized a half-hour daily check-in and check-out in the morning and afternoon respectively, through which students got ample opportunities to speak in a group setting about their own accomplishments and challenges for the day as well as their plans for the next day. Moreover, a PhD pathways panel and several professional development seminars on Graduate School and the research process were successfully organized to motivate students to pursue a research career. To facilitate communication, our site adopted multiple software tools (slack, google calendar, zoom, and moodle). An independent evaluator evaluated our program through online pre- and post-program surveys for both students and mentors as well as a focus group discussion with students. The evaluation report indicates significant improvement from the summer 2021 program regarding student satisfaction compared to the previous summer 2019 on-site program. Detailed quantitative analysis and lessons learned from the report will be presented in this paper to offer valuable experience and best practices for organizing effective cohort-based undergraduate research programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the transportation sector is responsible for almost 23% of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, electric vehicles (EVs) may play a critical role in achieving the environmental objectives of the Paris agreement that strengthens the global response to the threat of climate change. National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) and International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) predict that there will be more than 3 million EVs roaming the U.S. highways by 2025 [1-2]. Design and construction of EV charging stations using zero-emission photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are expected to positively impact environmentally friendly efforts on reducing carbon footprints specifically in metropolitan areas. This applied research paper reports efforts of engineering technology faculty and students to design and build a sustainable charging station that is fully sponsored by an energy services company. Department of Engineering Technology's multidisciplinary faculty, technician, and students with the logistic support from Academic Community Engagement (ACE) staff at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) secured a grant from Entergy Energy Company's Environmental Initiative Funding (EIF) to design and build a 50 kW PV-based EV fast DC charging station in the City of Huntsville's welcome center with an opportunity to provide sustainability and engineering showcase with the community. A group of students from electrical, electronics, mechanical, engineering design, and construction engineering technology programs in the Department of Engineering Technology are working in the project as part of their senior design project assignment during 2021-2022 academic year. In addition to ABET defined course objectives, goals and outcomes, senior design projects in the engineering and technology curriculum also serve as unique bridges between the academia and the communities. This paper reports a multi-group senior design project progress to design and construct a 50 kW solar array power system during the semesters of spring and summer 2022. The project will provide one fast DC charging station. The proposed PV array includes 120 panels with a rated power of 420 W, that is manufactured in the U.S. The PV power system will be connected to the grid with a 50-kW grid-tied inverter to provide reliable and resilient electricity. Faculty and students working in the project are responsible to design and install overall system equipment including utility scale concrete-ballasted ground mounts for 120 PV panels, balance of system units, charge controllers, LED light fixtures for night vision, the protection and measurement components, related combiners, and junction boxes. The 50 kW array includes 12 parallelconnected PV strings, each string containing 12 PVs connected in series which will provide an expected total voltage of 480 V DC and a total current of 125A DC to be connected to a threephase grid-tied inverter. This paper reports a teamwork of multidisciplinary engineering technology students for an ongoing major senior project that includes PV system design and installation including major construction and electrical work. A commercially available 62.5 kW Charge Point Express 250 DC fast charging module will be installed in Summer/Fall 2022, and overall system operation, student outcome assessment, and lessons learned will be reported in the 2023 ASEE annual conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work in Progress paper describes the implementation of a two-week module focused on health design thinking principles and practices into a Fall 2021 practicum course required for first-year biomedical engineering students. Upon completion of the module, students were expected to be able to conduct clinical observations using a variety of ethnographic instruments, express insights and identify needs following a video of a simulated clinical event (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and reflect on their learning and its impact. Student reflection papers were collected and analyzed for themes related to students' professional goals, civic and community engagement, and needs identification. The initial results of the thematic analysis are presented in this paper. Based on the results, we will discuss challenges related to the implementation of the program and suggest modifications intended for Fall 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the application of a teaching strategy we are calling "Science, Technology and Society (STS) Postures," that is used to help engineering students conceptualize socio-technical systems. STS Postures integrate three modes of doing: 1) Body/Mind fusion; 2) Data collection techniques; and 3) Systems thinking skills. STS postures takes a traditionally passive educational environment and introduces movement and change making to the engineering curriculum. Instead of sitting in seats in the classroom, we encourage students to move about. We try out different ways of holding ourselves and moving (literally our bodies) in relation to each other, STS, engineering, education, and technological artifacts. This change in posture is key to having agency in directing the future of science and technology, whether in their own education, their extracurricular work, or their careers. Body/Mind fusion is a corrective to thinking in science and engineering that separates the body from the mind, which reinforces counterproductive ideologies (e.g., depolitizication) and mindsets (e.g., technical narrowness, "the myth of objectivity") in engineering. We encourage students to connect intellectual endeavors with emotions, performance, proprioception, enteroception, metacognition, and play. Data collection itself is a form of movement that involves BodyMind abilities; put differently, how would we collect data without BodyMind? We teach a pallet of qualitative data collection techniques, such as document analysis, interviews, natural observation, participant observation, focus groups, visual image analysis, and metaphor analysis. These skills help students embrace a "systems thinking mindset" that involves understanding how to: 1) listen contextually; 2) find ethics in artifacts; 3) make meaning; 4) seek stories about science and technology's past, present, and future; 5) locate power in systems; 6) ask STS questions; and 7) host STS parties. We reason that if students can take some of these data collection skills and mindsets into their engineering classrooms, internships, and careers, we will have given them life-long tools of interruption for responsibly interrogating their interactions with science and technology. This paper provides examples of STS Posture activities that are used within a required engineering ethics course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the development of personalized job preparation and job search training and services for underrepresented STEM scholars as part of an institutional partnership model created to assist dissertators, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty along their path to joining and persisting in the professoriate. This work is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) grant awarded to four university partners. The alliance's goal is to develop, implement and study a model of STEM doctoral degree completion and the transition to successful postdoctoral fellowships and faculty careers for historically underrepresented minorities. Underrepresented Ph.D. candidates in STEM fields have long lacked role-models from similar demographic representations due to the small number of underrepresented faculty in STEM fields who can serve as role models and mentors. This has created systemic challenges in recruiting underrepresented students for PhD programs and retaining them into the professoriate. Institutions have been providing job preparation and job search support for their students through general career and related services, such as resume/CV writing, oral presentation skills, mock interviews, and access to employer databases. This type or support may not be the most valuable for Ph.D. dissertators and postdocs whose needs are unique and whose schedules are packed with multiple commitments. In this paper, we discuss the approach to identifying and implementing multi-year job search and preparation activities to match the needs of underserved STEM scholars who started as Ph.D. candidates and moved towards academic positions at different rates. Sources of data informing the personalized training and services include perspectives of the project leadership, and feedback from the participating scholars collected as part of program evaluation. This feedback helped fine-tune the partnership model to provide participating scholars with the most meaningful support possible. Findings suggest three design features of successful support: 1. While general training and support such as those offered by career service centers are useful, specific support by STEM faculty with real-time efforts in applying for academic positions was more timely and valuable for URM scholars. 2. Transition support is critical as scholars' needs shift from dissertator to postdoctoral researcher to early career faculty. For example, requests to review job applications early on were joined by interest in grant writing once scholars moved into their first postdissertation academic positions. 3. Real time writing groups focused on proposal development and application portfolio development represent one of the most promising practices. Participants reported multiple academic, social, and motivational benefits resulting from the weekly meetings. Particular attention to job search and preparation will provide value to underrepresented scholars and assist them to successfully secure and persist in academic positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of COVID, project-based classes that incorporate community engagement (i.e., interacting with both a physical site and members of the community) as part of their learning approach, have taken a significant blow. When connecting with people becomes an unhealthy practice, how can site-based learning remain embedded in engineering teaching and practice while accommodating virtual education instruction? Within civil and environmental engineering (CEE), GIS mapping has allowed students to step outside the classroom and engage with sitebased work while focusing on spatial learning technologies. The open-ended processes of spatial data gathering can be used to draw students into community observation, inviting a focus on ecological and social interactions of infrastructure, site, community, and equity. However, in the era of COVID, the full range of site-based learning processes, including community engagement, are impossible to implement. This paper describes two amended processes for site-based learning through GIS data practices during the post-COVID shutdown period. Pre-COVID versions of the exercises asked student teams to explore a single site by observing and mapping infrastructure. This involved documenting community use of space and interacting with the local community to obtain multilayered data on social equity, economic, and physical aspects of the site. However, two primary changes were made: in one class students were asked to explore their own local environment rather than travel to a shared site of focus. In the other, student teams collected only visual sitedata foregoing the community engagement component. These students then connected electronically with community partners to gather social data. The study draws on data from student participation in two different classes: a large introductory class and a smaller advanced class. Data includes a qualitative analysis of exit interviews with a sub-set of both undergraduate and graduate student participants. This paper examines to what extent the site-based practices retain value given the limits imposed by social distancing, and whether these workarounds reveal unexpected strategies which might be applicable to future remote learning, and to community-based learning even when physical reconnection is allowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of natural and engineered systems from blood flow to water distribution networks require energy loss calculations. In fluid mechanics for example, a remote lab can help to mitigate issues around available lab resources, which typically are limited at universities. Calculations of energy loss are consequently an important component of Fluids labs within several engineering majors. Using the interactive remote laboratory described in this paper, students are able to experiment in real time with the effects a pipe system has on energy losses. Making the lab equipment usable remotely, we are able to offer more and diverse options for self-guided experimentation experiences to the students. This BYOE paper will outline the design, build and implementation of such a lab in an introductory fluid mechanics course. The BYOE demonstration will include details on different aspects of the system. For example, users are able to control flow rate, valve function, and pressure port readings in order to develop friction factor versus Reynolds number plots (Moody diagram) and calculate minor loss coefficients for fittings. The presented experiment allows us to use such remote lab environments for a student-centered learning experience in a class that otherwise does not have a laboratory component. We will focus on the possible assignments that can result from the multiple configurations of inputs/outputs for the system. Finally, we will share first, preliminary evaluation data from pilot tests with students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial visualization is the ability to imagine what an object looks like from various viewpoints or after the object has been rotated in space or transformed in another way by some amount. Numerous studies have shown the link between spatial skills and success in engineering. But how do well-developed spatial skills contribute to engineering student success? In previous studies with elementary students, children with good spatial skills were able to create strategic sketches--sketches that accurately represented the problem and led to a correct answer. Poor visualizers drew non-strategic sketches--these were pictorial in style and did not lead to correct solutions. For example, when asked how many trees could be planted along a driveway that was 15 meters long if they were spaced every 5 meters, high visualizers drew a plan view of a line with an X spaced every 5 meters to arrive at the correct answer. Low visualizers drew a picture of a tree. In this paper, we report on a study to examine the link between spatial skills and the ability to solve problems from engineering mechanics. A total of 128 students from upper division engineering courses completed several tests of spatial skills and were also asked to solve 6 engineering mechanics problems. One of the six problems was merely to draw a free body diagram of a crane. In this paper, we examine the quality of the free body diagrams made by students to measure accuracy of the sketch, appropriateness of schematic representation and number and type of errors. How each of these factors relates to spatial ability will be reported along with examples of student work. This paper will illustrate the variation in approach to constructing free-body diagrams among students with low and high levels of spatial ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work in Progress paper describes the effect of Homework 0 (HW 0), an activity offered at Western University designed to support Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students' successful transition to the first year of college. This transition is a critical time as students face several personal and academic challenges [1] or most, college means a new lifestyle and level of independence [1]. Pre-college academic activities are positively correlated with a student's persistence and graduation [2] because these activities can support the development of a student's sense of belonging [3] to the university, their academic community, their profession. Sense of belonging, or a feeling of mattering [4], is a well-researched and documented predictor of retention and success [5]. Relationships and social networks are critical elements to success in the first year [3] of college. Researchers urge university personnel to engage early and frequently with first-year students to cultivate their social capital further in college [6]. Taken together, these theoretical lenses served as the foundation for the pre-college activity, HW 0. HW 0 consists of three asynchronous academic assignments students completed in the summer before their first full-time semester and follow up activities are completed during the first semester. These assignments were designed to provide a way for the student to learn about resources, activities, and engagement opportunities as well as to reflect on the challenges they are going through and to define strategies to face these challenges. The main research question guiding this study is how does engagement in a pre-college activity influence a student's sense of belonging, thus, success. Survey data collected in these activities has been analyzed to identify patterns among students and thus, identify the needs among them and define better programs to support them. Results from the 2021 program offering, included in this paper, indicate students who participated developed a greater sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering students and Engineering Technology students at Western Carolina University have many similarities at the beginning of their curriculum, but as the students progress in their degrees, the differences become more pronounced and relevant to their respective programs. An upper-level Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) student with a Mechanical Concentration takes the Fluid Dynamics course focused on a theoretical approach to fluids, while a Bachelor of Science Engineering Technology (BS-ET) upper-level student takes a Fluid Power Systems course with a focus on a more practical or applied approach to fluids. These differences in emphasis in the Fluids courses are also true in general between the BSE and BS-ET programs. This paper shows the implementation and assessment of a hands-on laboratory experience activity using the ET fluid power trainers for the BSE Fluid Dynamic course students. For the laboratory activity, the Industrial Fluid Power Trainers MF102 Series from the Fluid Power Training Institute were used to allow the students to directly work with the concepts of Pressure Drops, the relationships between Pressure-Force-Area, and the importance of the Bernoulli and Continuity equation. These concepts were presented to the students using a pressure in a series circuit, a regenerative circuit, and a weighted cylinder circuit. During the activity, the students were first introduced to the Trainers and showed how to build a simple circuit and then were guided to build the remainder of the circuits themselves. The laboratory activity was performed after the theoretical concepts were previously discussed in the Fluid Dynamic course in order to assess if the hands-on activity helped the students to visualize and better understand these concepts. The assessment method used to evaluate this experience was a retrospective survey where participants were provided a single survey after the end of the laboratory. The survey was a seven-question instrument with six 5-point Likert scale questions and one open-ended qualitative question. For each of the Likert questions, the participants were asked to reflect on each question and provide their answers describing their experience before and after the laboratory activity. The retrospective survey method was adopted to observe the effect of a shortterm activity like the laboratory exercise and help mitigate the survey burden of having to answer two surveys in a short period. The instrument and survey data are presented in this paper. A paired difference statistical test is performed on the quantitative survey responses, and a histogram-generated word cloud of the qualitative responses is shown. The results show a very significant and positive learning experience for the BSE students, suggesting that the Fluid Power laboratory activity can teach, or effectively reinforce, fluids concepts that the students would not have otherwise learned, or learned as well, in the standard Fluid Dynamic course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First-year engineering courses are relatively large with several sections; thus, it can be rather difficult for an individual instructor to recognize when a particular student begins to lose engagement. Learning management systems (LMS) (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace) can be valuable tools to provide a consistent curriculum across several sections of a course and generate data regarding students' engagement with course materials. However, a human-centered approach to transform the data needs to be utilized to extract valuable insights from LMS data. The purpose of this Complete Research paper is to explore the following research questions: What type of LMS objects contain information to explain students' grades in a first-year engineering course? Is the inclusion of a human operator during the data transformation process significant to the analysis of learning outcomes? For this, data from LMS is used to predict the learning outcome of students in a FYE course. Two predictive models are compared. The first model corresponds to a usual predictive model, using the data from the LMS directly. The second model considers the specifics of the course, by transforming the data from aggregate user interaction to more granular categories related to the content of the class by a human operator. A logistic regression model is fitted using both datasets. The comparison between predictive measures such as precision, accuracy, and recall are then analyzed. The findings from the transformed dataset indicate that students' engagement with the career exploration curriculum was the strongest predictor of students' final grades in the course. This is a fascinating finding because the amount of weight the career assignments contributed to the overall course grade was relatively low. Additionally, while both models produced adequate fit indices, the human-informed model performed significantly better and resulted in more interpretable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US-Sweden Clinical Bioinformatics Research Training Program is an NSF-funded International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program that aims to develop a diverse cohort of globally competent and engaged scientists/engineers that seek career opportunities and collaborators throughout the world. The program consists of a six-week preparatory virtual training series, a 4-day pre-departure symposium at the University of San Diego and a ten-week research program on site at the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden. The focus of this paper is to examine student attitudes and perspectives during their time abroad through an analysis of blog entries. In Summer 2021, six engineering undergraduates--three women and three men--participated in the inaugural program session. Over the course of the ten-week program, the students completed blog posts in response to four prompts related to their experiences, observations, and challenges. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the student blogs using a hybrid deductive and inductive thematic analysis approach. Our findings span two primary categories: professional and personal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mosquitos might have caused approximately seven hundred thousand deaths per year. Monitoring environmental factors for potential breeding sites of mosquitoes is an important and effective method in mosquito control. Several networks and systems for mosquito research have been developed in academic settings. For the research in this paper, the developmental progress of a low-cost data server and the network in the form of an IoT (Internet of Things) system with undergraduate engineering students is presented. A low-cost data server was proposed as one of the IoT system implementations for mosquito research. This low-cost cluster framework will be presented in this paper, which consists of multiple low-cost Raspberry Pi boards. A cluster was formed using four customized Raspberry Pi compute module 3+ (RPi CM3+) boards. In addition, the low-cost data server consists of a network switch, a custom interface PCB, and an enclosure. The network switch provides communication between the RPi CM3+ boards. The interface PCB was designed to provide power to the custom RPi CM3+ boards. An enclosure with a fan was designed and fabricated to secure all these boards and provide cooling to the system. Using this RPi cluster platform, a micro-Kubernetes cluster has been configured. One of the RPi CM3+ boards is configured as a master node, and the other CM3+ boards are configured as worker nodes. An Android application has been under development to access the data for the IoT cluster data server. The prototype cluster device was created by a capstone team at Texas A&M University. The capstone team was created in Fall 2020, and the capstone project was concluded in Spring 2021. Further research and development on this RPi cluster for mosquito research is in progress in the Dr. Hur's research group by one of the students who joined the graduate degree program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines students' productive beginnings of engineering judgement while solving open-ended problems in a second-year dynamics course. Undergraduate students are typically assigned well-structured textbook problems for homework, in which the systems have already been simplified and there are few, if any, open-ended decisions to be made. Therefore, students have few opportunities in class to practice their engineering judgment until capstone design courses. We have developed a framework of the productive beginnings of engineering judgment with data from open-ended modeling problems in statics courses. In this paper we investigate how the framework transfers to open-ended modeling problems in dynamics courses. This analysis suggests our framework is transferable to dynamics courses, with all fourteen types of judgement found in the dynamics data set and no additional ways of engaging in judgement were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work in progress paper presents asset mapping activities as a strategy to foster the development of engineering identities, sense of belonging, and engineering self-efficacy in a diverse student population and presents evidence on feasibility of this strategy. Asset-based approaches highlight and leverage students' diverse assets for teaching and learning in course activities. Students' assets or strengths may include community networks, language and communication skills, tinkering skills, and most importantly, their lived experiences. One assetbased pedagogical strategy is asset mapping, where students identify and categorize how their own experiences and backgrounds can provide them with useful skills and insights. Asset mapping has frequently been deployed in community development to help the general public recognize and build on existing resources and capabilities. However, less is known about deploying asset mapping in the engineering classroom. In this paper, we describe implementing asset mapping activities in a first-year engineering course at the University of Arizona, a large land-grant, Hispanic-serving institution. In our College of Engineering, approximately 20% of students identify as Hispanic/Latinx and 30% identify as female. We quantify changes in students' engineering identity, sense of belonging in engineering, and engineering self-efficacy over one semester for students who participated in asset mapping activities (n=31) and compare these changes to students in a control section of the same course (n=38). In our pilot deployment of asset maps, students tended to identify mostly technical skills (e.g., data analysis, prototyping) in their initial asset maps and in subsequent course activities related to asset development. Implementation lessons learned relating to teaming, discussions of implicit bias, and valuing diverse assets in design projects are also presented. These findings can help the engineering education community implement asset-based approaches such as asset mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work in Progress paper will explore and propose a framework for operationalizing ways in which exclusion is present in engineering culture and influential in engineering student attrition. Recruiting a large and diverse population of incoming engineering students has become a priority for many institutions to address both the growing need for engineers and the lack of diversity in engineeringrelated academic and industry settings. Despite efforts to improve recruitment and retention, the number of students that leave engineering before completing their degrees continues to be a problem. One reason for this retention problem that deserves exploration is how the 'weed-out' culture - or the belief that some courses or experiences remove students who are not 'cut-out' to be engineers - is influential in engineering attrition. The idea that not every student that aspires to be an engineer can or should be an engineer manifests itself commonly in higher education programs by way of these 'weed-out' courses and students' experiences within them. While GPA and course grades are commonly to blame for 'weeding' students out, exclusion is pervasive in the engineering community beyond quantitative measures of student abilities. While many students cite leaving engineering due to a lack of content knowledge, many others yet cite chilly climates, lacking a sense of belonging, unwelcoming and competitive environments, and so on. We posit that while 'weed-out' culture is associated with undergraduate engineering programs, exclusion is pervasive in the broader engineering community. While organizational culture theories have been used to study engineering industry and academic settings in past research, this Work in Progress paper will propose a framework of exclusion that can be used in future work to relate and connect 1) research on engineering culture, specifically focusing on beliefs regarding exclusion and who is or is not good enough to be an engineer and what metrics, people, or systems make that determination and 2) research on engineering student attrition and retention, specifically focusing on what factors students attribute to leaving engineering and how those factors relate to exclusion and 'weed-out' culture. We aim to use this framework to synthesize and combine these two bodies of research to shed new light on how the engineering education community discusses engineering retention and attrition. By applying an organizational culture lens to the challenge of engineering student retention, a new set of considerations and strategies could be at the disposal of higher education and administration in engineering colleges. Beginning to reframe the culture of engineering from one of exclusion to that of inclusivity has the potential to drastically change the ideas and perceptions of who can and cannot become an engineer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an evidence based practice paper. Across the United States, many universities, especially smaller, liberal arts universities, do not have the facilities to offer engineering degrees. One thing that has become very common in these schools that can't or don't offer engineering is the 3 + 2 program, where students receive a degree from one university in three years, then transfer to a partner engineering university after graduation to complete the engineering degree in the final two years. Students in these programs earn two bachelor's degrees, one typically in math or science, and one in engineering. There are benefits and drawbacks to this type or arrangement and partnership, but they can be successful. Recently, we have been running a similar program but with a very important modification. Our program is still a five year program, and students still earn two bachelor's degrees, one from a liberal arts school (primary university), and one from a world renowned engineering school (secondary university). The difference is that students in our program earn the degree from both schools at the same time and are enrolled students at both schools simultaneously for the full five years, and no transferring is required. Having run the program for ten years, we have noticed several benefits and drawbacks to this kind of program over the traditional 3 + 2 version. The biggest benefit is that all students are members of the home institution for the full five years, making financial aid much easier for students to deal with. All scholarships, including athletic, are valid for the full five years of the program, and the students deal only with the business side of one university. All bills and fees from the engineering institution are paid by the home university, and students never see those. By being at the home university for the full five years, students can settle and perform better knowing they don't have to up and move after three years. There are many other benefits we see, but there are also drawbacks. Communication between the business offices at both universities, getting the bills paid and keeping track of students, can be difficult. Since students are getting degrees from both schools, all degree requirements must be met, and all classes must be clearly linked at the two schools so that no requirements are missing. Also, students have to register at two schools at the same time, and pre-requisites can be issues. Overall, although there are drawbacks, the benefits can outweigh them and make a program like this successful. This engineering program has retained 94% or its' students from first year to second year from graduating classes, and 97% from current students. Of the students entering the program, 83% complete it and graduate with an engineering degree, and 89% have completed any degree at the primary institution. Finally, 100% of the students who have graduated from this program have either placed into graduate school or accepted a position within the engineering industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper seeks to examine faculty choice of teaching strategies to improve students' engineering self-efficacy [1], [2] (belief in one's abilities to successfully accomplish tasks in engineering) as well as their reflections on the effectiveness of the teaching strategy. Increases in self-efficacy have been related to improved academic and career outcomes [3], especially for women in non-traditional fields such as engineering. The goal of the study is to determine simple yet effective strategies that can be implemented in engineering classrooms to improve self-efficacy. Seven engineering faculty members participated in a faculty learning community (FLC), a semester long program to learn about teaching strategies in each of the four areas of selfefficacy; mastery experiences (e.g., active learning, scaffolding), vicarious learning (e.g., guest lectures, peer mentors, group work), social persuasion (e.g., constructive feedback, positive selftalk), and emotional arousal (e.g., test anxiety, building rapport). The faculty then chose and implemented strategies in each of the four areas in one of their engineering courses. Monthly meetings of the FLC during implementation allowed faculty to share their experiences and suggestions for refinements in their teaching strategy. The paper examines the faculty member choice (why they chose to use particular strategies in their course) as well as their reflections on how well the strategy worked (impact on student learning vs ease of implementation). In addition, the paper examines in-class observations and student survey responses to determine if they felt a particular strategy was useful. The research seeks to identify strategies that faculty members chose and are viewed as effective by both the faculty and students. The presentation will seek additional feedback from the wider community on the effectiveness of teaching strategies to improve self-efficacy and future work will include the analysis of additional surveys that were administered to measure student self-efficacy with the goal of determining simple and effective strategies that can be implemented in engineering classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper examines students' perceptions regarding their experiences in their registered academic departments. The Microsoft Product Reaction Cards (MPRC) and User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) are standardized usability questionnaires that is often used in the user experience field to gather qualitative data to better understand user perceptions of a product or system. Both instruments utilize a list of positive and negative adjectives that can describe interactions and use of a product or process. While student experience has been used for feedback on several aspects of engineering education, instruments like the MPRC and UEQ provide an alternative perspective from human factors that can provide a more structured framework for examining that experience. The objective of this paper is to better understand how the user experience questionnaires can be adapted to engineering education. The research questions for the paper include: RQ1. How do students describe their experience with respect to the UEQ and MPRC adjectives? and RQ2. How do these adjectives align with student experiences in engineering education? These research questions are studied through the use of student surveys and follow up interviews completed by students enrolled in an engineering department. In the survey, students chose adjectives from the MPRC list that they felt best described their individual experiences in an engineering department. Students then participated in a semi-structured interview to further discuss why those adjectives were chosen and to provide context and experiences related to it. Findings indicate a trend of positive adjectives selected to describe students' experiences with their stories to show why they feel that way. Many of these positive experiences were based on connections made with students within the department as well as the friendly environment that the faculty fosters. These findings provide a first step in creating a user experience tool to evaluate student experience in engineering departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender-neutral pronouns, particularly singular they, are becoming increasingly visible. Engineering texts do not often require consideration of gender when they treat technical content, but social considerations in engineering education regularly rely on case studies. Ethics case studies are a common approach to teaching ethical reasoning to engineering students and feature individuals who must make a choice in a difficult ethical reasoning scenario. The evolution of such case studies to feature female characters more equitably has occurred with gender equity efforts in engineering education. Further evolution to support the full gender spectrum will require similar advancements and changes to education practice. This paper describes an effort to modify an existing engineering ethics case study to use singular they pronouns to refer to the named main character and unnamed supervisor. The more general client, a county public works department, was also a gender-neutral character. An analysis of the resulting responses by students is presented including an examination of gender attribution to both the protagonist engineer, their supervisor, and their client. The engineer was gendered in all but two student responses, with most applying he/him pronouns and only three out of 23 students applying she/her pronouns. Only five students self-reported after the fact that they recognized the gender-neutral presentation of the case study statement. This paper generates many questions, but the results demonstrate a distinct bias that will require effort on the part of engineering educators and the profession to overcome. Suggestions to improve engineering ethics instruction include preparing ethics case studies with greater gender representation in characters and preparing ethics assessments as role playing exercises that put students in the shoes of the protagonist rather than asking them to critique another's actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work in progress paper explores faculty perceptions of ePortfolios for assessment with a focus on the barriers to implementation and the possible influences on their instructional approaches. This paper draws on data from a larger in-progress design-based research study on the development of cross-course ePortfolios through an optional experience designed for secondyear mechanical engineering students. Through a lens of expectancy value theory, an initial analysis was done on seven faculty interviews to shed light on some of the reasons why ePortfolios have not been widely adopted in engineering education. Preliminary analysis identified both expectancy-related and value-based barriers, which indicates additional groundwork is needed to support faculty in the use of ePortfolios in the classroom. However, faculty predictions of how the implementation of ePortfolios in their classrooms would influence their teaching indicated almost all of them would feel the need to modify core course assignments or instructional approaches. These data support a conclusion that initially implementing ePortfolios at a program-level, before class-level integration, may be an effective strategy to support sustained adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]