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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]

In the fall of 2017, an engineering educator with many years of experience offered a course to incoming doctoral students. The course was focused on helping the students explore approaches to reading published scholarship and develop their own scholarly reading practice. The course was taken by a student who documented her experiences in a reflection journal. Against this backdrop, this paper uses intertwined autobiographical perspective of the student and the educator in relation to the course to shed light broadly on learning and instructional design in the context of scholarly reading. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the learning trajectories associated with emerging scholars becoming capable, critical, and generous readers of published disciplinary scholarship. For example, the student is shown to have experienced a realization of accumulated knowledge and skill, confronted questions of the self, identity, and belonging, and discovered personal reading strategies as she navigated learning how to read academic research. In addition, this paper provides insight into the considerations involved in designing learning experiences that help emerging scholars become capable, critical, and generous readers of published disciplinary scholarship. Specifically, we note the potential importance of considering the synergy between individual and group contributions, the balance between seriousness and lightheartedness, and the need for both opportunities to learn and opportunities to be aware of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current and historical sociopolitical national events have brought diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the forefront of discussion in academia. In response to this surge in social awareness of DEI, universities nationwide put forth plans and proposals for inclusive campus communities and initiatives to promote diversity. Educators, including engineering faculty, play a critical role in guiding students through these complex conversations. Based on this responsibility, we need to understand the state of faculty's knowledge levels and willingness to engage in these topics. The purpose of this study is to perform a systematic literature review of engineering education journals and conference proceedings to answer the research question: What themes emerge in current and previous EER on engineering faculty readiness to address DEI topics in their programs and classrooms? Our literature review consisted of a search through three conference-paper and five journalarticle databases for faculty beliefs about DEI from 2000 to 2021. Any student-centered studies and non-engineering faculty studies were excluded. Once a preliminary set of articles was found, we performed secondary and tertiary rounds of exclusion to compile a set of 22 articles that addressed our research question. This limited number of articles demonstrates that faculty beliefs about DEI are not commonly studied or discussed in engineering education research (EER). Because DEI is an essential topic in education and engineering, this result suggests a significant gap in EER community knowledge. With this gap in mind, we thematically analyzed the 22 articles that met the inclusion criteria to understand what faculty beliefs EER has focused on. The main result of this analysis was our proposed model, the Problematization-to-Action Continuum (PTAC), which highlights faculty's readiness to make change efforts toward promoting DEI. The PTAC model is a single-axis continuum that contains three defined points (each end and the center). On one end, engineering faculty do not acknowledge there are problems concerning DEI, and there are no actions taken toward bettering these issues. In the center, faculty acknowledge that there are problems but feel they lack knowledge to take actionable steps to alleviate them. On the other end, faculty recognize patterns of inequity and actively intervene to promote inclusive practices. The largest grouping of papers on the PTAC (N=11 of 22) was located at the center of the model, revealing that there is an acknowledgement of the need for increased DEI efforts, but little action has been taken toward these efforts. Overall, this literature review showed that there is an understanding of the responsibility to act regarding DEI efforts but a lack of knowledge or resources to execute and sustain DEI practices and policies. Future work involves investigating faculty's role in action plans for DEI policy change. By addressing faculty's role in these initiatives, we can support engineering faculty to engage in meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders and implement research-based strategies for improving DEI in their local academic institutions. The collective impact of strategically including faculty in DEI efforts will further the national conversation about the importance of DEI to make lasting change in our educational system. [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]

In this paper, we are interested in exploring the question: how much explicit, named attention has reflection received in engineering education scholarship and how do we interpret these results? We conducted a systematic literature review of the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education) conference publications to better understand the role of reflection in engineering education scholarship through assessing the number of papers that involve reflection in some way. In our search, we categorized the publications by scope of reflection: the extent to which reflection is mentioned, and type of reflection: how reflection is being operationalized. As a result of our findings, it is evident that there has been a significant and recognizable upward trend in the explicit attention to reflection across the body of the ASEE conference publications. Understanding the trends of reflection across literature can help us further analyze its prevalence and importance in the engineering education community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their growing population, the number of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students enrolling in engineering baccalaureate programs has remained static, and representation in the workforce has followed suit. This ongoing dilemma, cast alongside the continuing paucity of AI/AN success in academic engineering programs, prompts a review of engineering education research conducted with AI/AN populations. In this manuscript, papers dealing exclusively with AI/AN populations were systematically selected out of the body of work included in ASEE conference proceedings since 2005. These were then analyzed for the extent to which they accounted for the complexity of AI/AN lived experiences using a framework developed from Tribal Critical Race Theory. Results indicated that extant work does largely center Indigenous paradigms and do include outcomes tied to AI/AN communities, while not contextualizing the effects of colonization or accounting for the legal/political character of AI/AN identity. This manuscript therefore offers an analysis of recent work through a critical theoretical lens in an attempt to identify areas of focus where future work may have the most impact on engaging more AI/AN students to pursue engineering education and careers. [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]

Source code plagiarism presents a continual threat to the integrity and effectiveness of engineering education, as habitual cheating often has devastating impacts on students' academic and professional careers. As programming becomes an increasingly central component of first-year engineering curricula, it is essential that instructors are able to uphold academic integrity by identifying students who engage in misconduct, either through direct plagiarism or excessive peer collaboration. Instructors have an arsenal of plagiarism detection tools at their disposal, and students are keenly aware of this. Consequently, in an attempt to evade detection, students routinely make superficial modifications to plagiarized work prior to submission. Effective plagiarism detection tools attempt to mitigate the effect of these alterations, however, the extent to which precision can be maintained for heavily modified code is limited. One aim of this paper is to quantify the effect of code modification strategies on a plagiarism detection tool's ability to preserve both sensitivity to plagiarism and precision of results. This paper will introduce a novel dimensionless metric apt for the evaluation and comparison of a plagiarism detection tool's robustness to code modification. The specific context of engineering education presents additional challenges, as research in plagiarism detection methods and performance is often not applicable to short programs in dynamically typed languages which constitute typical submissions in first-year engineering coursework. This paper will analyze the performance of relevant plagiarism detection tools on short Python programs, specifically those of fifty lines or fewer, that have been transformed by common code modification tactics, and evaluate which tools are most appropriate for use in this environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Centers (ERC) are required to develop and implement education and outreach opportunities related to their core technical research topics to broaden participation in engineering and create partnerships between industry and academia. Additionally, ERCs must include an independent evaluation of their education and outreach programming to assess their performance and impacts. To date, each ERC's evaluation team designs its instruments/tools and protocols for evaluation, resulting in idiosyncratic and redundant efforts. Nonetheless, there is much overlap among the evaluation topics, concepts, and practices, suggesting that the ERC evaluation and assessment community might benefit from having a common set of instruments and protocols. ERCs' efforts could then be better spent developing more specific, sophisticated, and time-intensive evaluation tools to deepen and enrich the overall ERC evaluation efforts. The implementation of such a suite of instruments would further allow each ERC to compare its efforts to those across other ERCs as one data point for assessing its effectiveness and informing its improvement efforts. Members of a multi-ERC collaborative team, funded by the NSF, have been leading a project developing a suite of common instruments and protocols which contains both quantitative and qualitative tools. This paper reports on the development of a set of qualitative instruments that, to date, includes the following: (a) a set of interview/focus group protocols intended for various groups of ERC personnel, centered around five common topics/areas, and (b) rubrics for summer program participants' verbal poster/presentations and their written poster/slide deck presentation artifacts. The development process is described sequentially, beginning with a review of relevant literature and existing instruments, followed by the creation of an initial set of interview questions and rubric criteria. The initial versions of the tools were then pilot-tested with multiple ERCs. Feedback sessions with education/evaluation leaders of those piloting ERCs were then conducted, through which further revision efforts were made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On campus, faculty and staff are given a document called the "Red Folder"- a paper folder that contains resources to help identify students that may be in crisis and get them connected to mental health resources on campus. This folder, while useful does have its drawbacks. Most importantly is the fact that it can be easily lost or damaged since it is just paper. Additionally, many faculty store this in their office or in a bag which they may not always have on them limiting their access to this information. On top of all this, only faculty and staff were given the Red Folder so students did not have the same level of access to this information. To solve this problem, students under faculty guidance worked to create an app called LionHELP. LionHELP had two main goals; the first was to create a tool that would give students access to the same mental health resources as the faculty. The second was to create a replacement for the Red Folder that could live as a native app on each person's smartphone to facilitate access at a moment's notice. To develop this app, three students were selected to work with a faculty mentor. The students were majoring in either Computer Science or Software Engineering. To assist with the development and help steer the project, two outside experts were also enlisted. The first was a faculty member from the English department at the school who specializes in English composition and in creating inclusive content that can be understood by a variety of levels of English fluency. The second was a member of the campus counseling center and a certified case manager. The students worked as a team with one student leading the charge on iOS development and the other on Android development with the third serving as a go between and aiding both projects as needed. Each week the students met with the faculty mentor as well as the outside experts to review progress and plan next steps. Prior to the start of the Fall 2021 semester, the app was deployed to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store as free downloads for students. The app has been welcomed by faculty, staff, and students with other campuses in the school system being interested in adapting this app for their own uses. Students have been interested in the app as well prompting an article from the student run newspaper to be written and published. The successful development of this app opens the door to future development efforts that include adding in resources to help students get connected to resources on campus related to learning disabilities and other situations that can make a difference in student success on campus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As technologies develop, the tools used in classrooms to support student learning are ever evolving. While this change can provide avenues for new exploration and enhanced educational experiences, critically assessing these developments is essential to ensure that there are added educational benefits to these new technologies and tools. This paper details an electronic notebook that was implemented in select sections of a first-year engineering course to replace the use of traditional paper notebooks. While the implementation seemed successful and there were anticipated benefits to switching from a paper to electronic based system, critical assessment data based on good assessment practices was collected to truly measure the impact of the change and new technology use. In this paper, we report on the electronic notebooks themselves and the assessment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will describe and discuss the learning strategies applied in an Engineering Management Organizational Behavior course to enhance and encourage students to go beyond rote memorization and simple understanding of concepts to application, synthesis, evaluation and creation for an organization. The learning strategies to be considered are: 1) research and delivery of a real-world case study application of an organization applying the organizational behavior concepts; 2) within-class active learning exercises applying the organizational behavior concepts; 3) developing a written paper applying the concepts to an organization; 4) exploratory surveys based upon the organizational behavior concepts; and 5) traditional quizzes and a final exam including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer essay questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data Science plays a vital role in sciences and engineering disciplines to discover meaningful information and predict the outcome of real-world problems. Despite the significance of this field and high demand, knowledge of how to effectively provide data science research experience to STEM students is scarce. This paper focuses on the role of data science and analytics education to improve the students' computing and analytical skills across a range of domain-specific problems. The paper studies four examples of data-intensive STEM projects for supervised undergraduate research experiences (SURE) in Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical science, Quantum Physics, and Cybersecurity. The developed projects include the applications of data science for improving additive manufacturing, automating microscopy images analysis, identifying the quantum optical modes, and detecting network intrusion. The paper aims to provide some guidelines to effectively educate the next generation of STEM undergraduate and graduate students and prepare STEM professionals with interdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and competencies in data science. The paper includes a summary of activities and outcomes from our research and education in the field of data science and machine learning. We will evaluate the student learning outcomes in solving big data interdisciplinary projects to confront the new challenges in a computationally-driven world. [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]

To tackle today's toughest problems, like climate change and the threat of global pandemics, design teams will need to deliver not only software solutions, but also innovative hardware products, sometimes called "tough-tech" or "hard-tech." Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a key tool for these design teams to leverage in order to reach creative, innovative, hard-tech solutions for society's most pressing issues. Given CAD's importance in design, it is positioned to be a key enabler, or barrier, to increasing diversity in design teams. Statistics on the representation of women in CAD-reliant engineering fields, such as mechanical engineering, show that the numbers remain much below the overall female representation in engineering, and far below gender parity. Differences in confidence and ability level with CAD software are factors that may explain why this disparity exists, and so a focus on increasing accessibility of this tool provides an opportunity to increase female and non-binary representation in design teams. In this paper, we conduct a focused literature review to provide a comprehensive understanding of what factors position CAD as a barrier to women's engagement in engineering. The primary finding of this literature review is, in fact, the lack of literature; a deep body of knowledge exists to understand Women in Engineering and gender barriers in the profession more broadly, and in parallel, a rich literature on considerations for designing effective and efficient CAD tools and training exists. Yet we see a distinct lack of literature with a primary focus on the intersection of gender considerations in CAD. Based on the limited literature we did discover, we identify several potential barriers to gender diversity in CAD-reliant engineering fields: gender bias in CAD training, lack of representation of women in CAD communities, gender disparity in spatial reasoning skills, and differences in self-efficacy levels. With knowledge of these barriers, we then propose two strategic approaches for leveraging CAD as an avenue to increase gender diversity in mechanical design, which incorporate course design, outreach activities, and general considerations for engineering. These preliminary recommendations can be utilized by educators to support women and non-binary students towards the goal of creating more diverse design teams in undergraduate studies and beyond, ultimately leading to the innovative and creative hard-tech solutions needed to solve society's biggest problems. Importantly, we aim for this paper to act as a motivator to conduct further research in the area of gender considerations in CAD tools and trainings to better understand the actual barriers that women and non-binary individuals face in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) employs a methodical approach to aligning the needs of the civil engineering profession, and the needs of the public it serves, with its standards for education and practice. The primary tools involved in this approach are the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge (CEBOK) and the program criteria for ABET-accredited civil engineering programs, both of which are reviewed by ASCE and revised, if deemed necessary, on an 8-year cycle. Following the publication of the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge, 3rd Edition (CEBOK3), in May 2019, ASCE convened a Civil Engineering Program Criteria Task Committee (CEPCTC) in January 2020 to review the current ABET Civil Engineering Program Criteria and propose revisions, if needed, based on (1) the content of the CEBOK3, (2) a significant revision to the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) General Criteria which became effective for reviews during the 2019-2020 accreditation cycle, and (3) compliance with guidance from the EAC on curricular topics and faculty qualifications. This paper is the second in a series of papers to describe the efforts by ASCE and the CEPCTC in reviewing and revising the Civil Engineering Program Criteria throughout the Task Committee's planned two-year lifespan. The first paper, presented at the 2021 ASEE National Conference and Exposition, documented the formation of CEPCTC and its development of an initial draft of proposed criteria revisions. This paper focuses on a) the solicitation and collection of feedback from a broad community of stakeholders regarding the initial draft of proposed criteria changes, b) further revisions to the proposed criteria in response to that feedback, and c) the process currently underway to develop a Commentary and training materials that will support implementation and use of the proposed program criteria. By describing the proposed criteria and their development, this paper will aid in understanding and implementing the criteria by the civil engineering education community. It is proposed that ABET Member Societies share their approaches for promulgating and updating program criteria to improve these activities across the engineering profession and, perhaps, also improve the resulting program criteria across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research paper, we will continue to develop an understanding of our epistemologies and values of our qualitative engineering education research community through an analysis of relationships with our data in recently published articles. Qualitative research has become more commonplace and valued in engineering education in recent years. However, some tensions are apparent within qualitative research as some people within our community (researchers and consumers of our research) are more positivist leaning while others embrace more constructivist, postmodern, and critical ways of engaging as researchers. The purpose of this paper is to consider some of these tensions in our community through considering researchers relationships and use of data in journal publications. The research question guiding this study was: Through an analysis of qualitative, engineering education manuscripts published in 2019, what is our relationship with data and what might this tell us about our values and epistemologies? Journal articles that are qualitative, engineering education, and published in 2019 were identified through database searches of Engineering Village and Google Scholar resulting in 27 journal articles from nine journals. The analysis followed a process presented in the book, Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research [1] and involved multiple readings of each journal article and considerations of the types and amounts of data, the relationships between researchers and the data, the types of questions authors tried to answer with their data, how authors worked with and learned from their data, and how data was analyzed. The results suggest a range of types and amounts of data collected by engineering education researchers who seem to have diverse epistemological leanings. Moreover, the relationships between researchers and data ranged from a desired separation between the two to a process of co-construction with participants. The insights gained from this analysis suggest epistemological tensions between and among researchers and faculty in our community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper reports on pilot testing of instruments for an NSF-funded research project that aims to bridge the gap between professional engineering work and engineering graduate education, in accordance with a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM] policy document (2018). The project will apply, research, and develop communities of practice (CoP; Wenger, 1998) theory in three graduate classes from three different engineering departments. A community of practice is a group of people who share purposes and methods, which emerge from the needs of a context, with the negotiation of shared meaning and forms of participation. The project will investigate how CoPs form, how CoPs in different disciplines learn to interact and collaborate, and what conditions foster equitable participation by all members of a CoP. Prior research shows that highly diverse communities have optimal team performance and creativity, but only if members feel psychologically safe. Data sources contemplated include personal interviews, classroom observations, a psychological safety survey, survey on perceptions of class, and a CoP-specific instrument, the Community Assessment Toolkit (CAT). In this paper we report on our piloting of the instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a push for integrating concepts of sustainability and sustainable development in engineering education. The U.S. National Society of Professional Engineers' Code of Ethics expects engineers "to adhere to the principles of sustainable development in order to protect the environment for future generations". This push has resulted in significant research and efforts to reform engineering curricula to focus on sustainable development, or the "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" in the 1987 Brundtland Commission's report. Such research and reform efforts can manifest in several forms and contexts, and it can be difficult to obtain a broader picture of how engineering education as a whole is progressing in this area. To help provide a view of that picture, this paper strives to understand the recent trends in engineering education research for sustainable development by analyzing the relationships between the increasingly popular topics of sustainability and sustainable development and how they have evolved over the past two decades. Using text network analysis, a natural language processing technique, this study explores the thematic structure of scholarly publications that address the integration of sustainability and/or sustainable development in engineering courses, across curricula and across disciplines. In particular, we extract the thematic structure of over 1,500 abstracts of conference proceedings published in the American Society of Engineering Education related to this issue. With the aid of co-occurrence network maps and epoch trend analysis, we identify the major topics among these engineering education studies. Analyses of these trends indicate that the topics of sustainability and sustainable development have been consistently addressed primarily in civil engineering education research for the past two decades. This implies that these topics have not appeared in many other disciplinary areas of research. In addition, renewable energy is one of the more prevalent topics within the area of engineering education for sustainable development. We report our detailed results by providing insights on how these topics have evolved over time, and the semantic similarities between topics that have similar trending patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common practice for authors to study engineering education projects where authors propose a theoretical framework for a teaching approach, collect and interpret data and students' feedback, and report findings through the prism of their understanding of theory and implications. The approach taken in this paper is different. This paper is prepared by students who participated in a multidisciplinary capstone project, and it presents first-hand highlights of the student-participants' perspective of their experiences as a response to multidisciplinary teaching interventions. The paper emphasizes the importance for college graduates to develop multidisciplinary collaboration skills and competencies for successful employment. A summary of various approaches practiced in higher education to provide opportunities for multidisciplinary learning, including capstone projects, is outlined in the literature review. The paper describes goals, objectives, and outcomes of a project assigned to a multidisciplinary capstone team. The authors outline organization of the multidisciplinary student collaboration in the project, team structure, project activities, and communication and teamwork practices. Students' learning experiences, including benefits, challenges, and lessons learned are discussed in the paper, presenting different points of view from different disciplines. Relevance of multidisciplinary teaching for student career goals and value for their professional development are discussed in the paper. The authors provide suggestions for improvements and advice to instructors and peers for improving multidisciplinary learning experiences at the college level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near-peer mentoring is a common teaching practice where a senior learner guides a junior learner. The proximity of skills and experiences of near-peer mentors generate a deep level of relation and understanding of mentee needs, allowing mentors to provide effective learning strategies. This connection between mentor and mentee enhances mentee learning, confidence, and motivation. However, the benefits of near-peer mentoring for the mentors are less clear. To understand the benefits of near-peer mentoring for mentors, we collected data from near-peer mentors who participated in a Science Technology Engineering Art and Mathematics summer camp. The summer camp was a weeklong remote paper mechatronics camp designed for incoming seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students. Mechatronics is an interdisciplinary field that combines electronics, computation, and mechanics and thus provides a high ceiling for creative design. In contrast, paper mechatronics focuses on inexpensive paper components and craft parts to create a low barrier for student entry. The camp was grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy to promote learning, identity development, and sense of belonging to STEM. It consisted of two key components: near-peer mentors and storytelling. Near-peer mentors were the primary facilitators for the students. The mentors were two undergraduate engineering students responsible for designing the project curriculum, testing, developing student support, and facilitating most of the sessions throughout the summer camp, with supervision from faculty members. The students created two machines, the Walking Jansen and the Up-and-Down Crank. Furthermore, students were encouraged to use their personal experiences and identities to tell stories through their projects. To assess the benefits of near-peer mentoring, we asked What did near-peer mentors gain from creating and facilitating the summer camp? We collected two forms of data to address the research question 1. Daily journals kept by the mentors during the camp, and 2. Semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals considerable benefits for the mentors: Mentors developed essential teaching skills, their belonging to STEM improved, and mentors practiced consolidation. The results highlight the extensive benefits of near-peer mentoring. Near-peer mentoring is a valuable enrichment opportunity to supplement undergraduate core engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A first-generation student is defined as someone whose parents do not have a 4-year degree. Since their parents did not have any experience in how to navigate college academic and social lives, first generation students are faced with many challenges including maintaining identity, academic persistence, and a balanced social life. Further, research shows that these students tend to come from lower family income bracket, lack sufficient academic preparation specially for a major like engineering or other STEM majors and tend to work more to cover the expenses as well as to support their families. Furthermore, first generation students also face challenges with respect to "social capital" as they do not come with an established social network that they can lean on when they need support. Similarly, research suggests these students also lack the "cultural capital", which refers to an experiential gap in their parents compared to those whose parents have academic qualifications and experience that they share with their children. While several intervention methods can be found in higher education literature to improve the academic and social experience of first-generation students, mentoring and summer bridge programs are two key methods that are widely adopted. This paper presents a case study of a first-generation engineering (FGEn) student mentoring program at a large U.S. university. The program currently focuses on first year students in the college of engineering. The Texas A&M University has a common first year program for all engineering and engineering technology majors. The FGEn program was established in 2017 and has been providing mentoring services to about 150 to 160 freshmen every year. The mentor pool consists of both engineering faculty/staff and peer mentors. Unlike many first-generation student programs, the FGEn program is a one-on-one mentoring and does not provide any financial assistance to mentees. However, the program offers a variety of programs during the academic years that help engage the students. Academic performance of the FGEn students and their social experience over the last three years are presented in the paper. The results suggest that the FGEn mentoring program has demonstrably improved the academic performance and generally provided a positive social experience for the students. Lastly, the paper also provides a brief discussion on the findings of a survey of first-generation students at Texas A&M university with respect to the challenges they face in maneuvering their academic and social lives as a university student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ENGE 380 (Instrumentation) course offered to the engineering students at the junior level at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) provides the basic foundation for the interdisciplinary domain of sensors, instrumentation, and data acquisition that permeates almost all scientific and engineering endeavors. Project efforts integral to the course offer an opportunity to the primary author to expose interested students to the experiential learning and research efforts ongoing at the campus under his leadership that are aligned with sustainability-related initiatives of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), earth and space science mission objectives of NASA, and the broad educational experiences for students in a land grant minorityserving campus. To provide hands-on learning experiences the students are introduced to a popular microprocessor board with add-on sensors & actuators kit to complement the course lectures. Students receive guidance with the basics of the microprocessor board and its peripherals for analog and digital inputs and outputs. As an integral component of the project, the students are encouraged to participate in extramurally funded project efforts collaborating with doctoral students in the Food Science and Technology (FDST) graduate program in the areas of mechatronics for smart farming and digital agriculture. This paper will provide an overview of the ENGE 380 course and the project efforts integrated with the fall 2021 offering of the course. In particular, the paper will highlight the instrumentation and data acquisition efforts undertaken by interested students to investigate the charging patterns of solar and wind turbine setup that powers a 3 axis farming robot installed in a tunnel house over a 10 ft. by 20 ft. raised bed, as well as an autonomous precision ground robot under development in the campus for collecting photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) data at selected way-points under the crop canopy. ABET learning outcomes and assessment efforts that are in alignment with the course will also be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) Teaching Workshop (ETW) started in 1999 and has produced 1035 graduates from 266 colleges and universities throughout the world. ASCE has conducted 44 week-long, inperson workshops without interruption for over two decades. The ExCEEd graduates returned to their home universities and applied the lessons of this workshop to the classes they teach. The details and long-term benefits of the ETW have been reported in many venues. In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation and remained a persistent threat throughout 2021. As a result, the in-person workshops scheduled for Summer 2020 and Summer 2021 were canceled. This paper is the third in a three-part series that describe and assess how ASCE modified and continued the ExCEEd program during this difficult period. In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation and remained a persistent threat throughout 2021. As a result, the in-person workshops scheduled for Summer 2020 and Summer 2021 were canceled. This paper is the third in a three-part series that describe and assess how ASCE modified and continued the ExCEEd program during this difficult period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This evidence based study is derived from other work in progress related to the history of engineering education in the UK. Its interest lies in the fact that in 1955/56 the British government created a sub-system of higher technological education in England and Wales that had as its objective, the education of highly qualified engineers and applied scientists for manufacturing industry. This sub-system came to an end in 1964/5. While it could have been the subject of an official evaluation, it was not. However, fortuitously, it was established during a period increasing interest in research in higher education, and several researches addressed various aspects of the system that, accidentally, make a retrospective, but partial informal evaluation possible. The discussion is presented in two papers because of the structure of the conference, and the need to provide the detailed explanation of the cultural system in which the development took place which would be of substantial length. That is the purpose of this, the first paper. Together these papers have a secondary function of showing factors that contributed to the success and failure of a major innovation in order that the mistakes made will not be repeated in the future: that is to foster learning of the collective past. Their final purpose is more international collaboration among engineering educators and its research fraternity. Since the social forces (attitudes, beliefs and values) at work in society ultimately determine the success or failure of educational innovations, part 1 (this paper) shows the importance of social class in what is valued and not valued in the English educational system. The academic is preferred to the vocational. Grammar schools and universities are associated with the academic. Technical and further education colleges with the vocational. The antecedent philosophy driving this innovation in degree level technological education, as expressed in the 1945 report of the Percy Committee on Higher Technological Education placed the Colleges of Advanced Technology (CATs) created in 1955/6 firmly in the vocational sector. The results of the investigations carried out in the CATs reported in part 2 (the second paper) showed that schoolteachers and their pupils tended to view the CATs as second class citizens: that most students had good experiences of industrial training although many believed it could be improved, and that the curriculum offered tended to model that found in the universities. The Robbins Committee believed that the curriculum offered was of degree level standard and recommended that the CATs be given university status, which they were in 1964/5. For the convenience of the reader part 1 is preceded by a list of abbreviations, and a time line. The research for the papers summarised in part 2 took place between 1960 and 1965. A note on problems of presenting studies about non-American systems of engineering and technological education at ASEE conferences is included in the introduction to part 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effort to develop an undergraduate research course to produce an alternative to a mandatory internship course, Engineering Practice taken by all majors including manufacturing engineering. The new course is labeled as Engineering Research Projects. However, with the growing enrollments and especially in international students, internship placement has become a challenge. The new Engineering Research Projects course will reduce the pressure on Engineering Practice distributing the enrollment in between both courses. It will also accommodate the growing research needs of the department while engaging students in activities that prepare them for graduate study. The author have been utilizing the internal research projects from the last 10 years as a reference in designing this course. These projects happened under the umbrella of the Engineering Practice course. The new course will be a better match in terms of its requirements. Engineering Practice requires at least 150 hours of engineering work that may include design, analysis, development, maintenance, service, and even technical sales. Each student in the Engineering Practice course deliver a PPT presentation after completing the experience, turn in a final report or a portfolio covering the work done along with a weekly log and journal that describes the activities. Students also complete a student survey to reflect on their experience and are graded by their work supervisors. The new course will also include the minimum hours requirement, weekly journals and logs along with the PPT Presentation. The main difference will be that the students are required to produce scholarly works including conference papers and trade journal articles. Scholarly works of appropriate quality may also be submitted to scientific journals. The completion and submission of these works will be the requirement, not the acceptance. The course will draw its students from internal and collaborative research projects at the institution along with students conducting research at other local institutions and through NSF REU and other similar programs. The number of students engaging research have been growing rapidly along with graduate study. Students will be utilizing research databases such as Scopus, Proquest, and Google Scholar, be guided on research methods and scholarly work production. Intellectual Property information and Google Patent will also be an important part of the course if the students develop an original product or process. This course will not replace the interdisciplinary capstone course, Integrated Engineering Design but will be a good complement to it along with Engineering Practice. This paper includes a literature review on including research in undergraduate curriculum, the syllabus including ABET student learning outcomes, and relate to the existing and previous research work done at the institution as case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When attempting to teach the project control cycle, the importance of 'evaluate' is difficult to convey to students yet is critical to students' academic and professional success. This paper represents a qualitative case study conducted with freshman construction management students to convey the importance of evaluating project performance -- regardless if the project was a success or not. According to the course textbook, the hardest step of the project control cycle to implement is the last step of document, report and evaluate. Of these, the evaluation portion is even more difficult for a team to accomplish. In order to instill in students early in their degree program the importance of evaluation both to their academic and professional success, an assignment was developed and implemented with students enrolled in an introductory construction management course. Participation in this assignment was optional. Out of 110 students enrolled in the course, 52 completed the optional assignment. Thematic analysis was conducted on a sample of the students' papers. The preliminary results provide insight into students' evaluation of their success during their first semester, which is a critical semester in students' college careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In philosophy and psychology literature, empathy in general refers to 1) the ability to understand another person's ideas and feelings; and 2) the inclination to feel emotionally responsive to, and act to alleviate, another person's distressful experience. Until recently, however, discourses on "empathy" in engineering education are inspired primarily by "empathic design," a concept that originated from market research and first gained popularity in the business world. This paper argues that the discourse of "empathic design" inadvertently advances an instrumentalist interpretation of empathy, one that ignores the depth and breadth of philosophical and psychological insights into empathy. The adoption of this instrumentalist, product-oriented conception of empathy exacerbates some persistent problems confronting engineering education, including a tendency to objectify the users of engineering products. Seeking to reconstruct empathy on the ground of philosophy and psychology literature, in this paper I begin to develop a genealogy of empathy in engineering education. The paper does this by tracing the discursive history of empathy in engineering education and in its discipline-based sub-communities (e.g., design and entrepreneurship). This genealogical survey also examines recent scholars' efforts toward redefining empathy as an engineering competency, which lays the groundwork for envisioning "empathic engineering." Champions of empathic engineering, taking advantage of knowledge developed in psychology and social work, link empathy to engineering students' moral development and communication skills. Ultimately, empathic engineering aims at advancing objectives related to community needs, sustainability, and social justice. I assess the implications of the discursive migration from "empathic design" to "empathic engineering" for the identity formation of the engineering profession. Furthermore, I argue that the movement toward "empathic engineering" suggests the potential for overcoming a narrowly-defined, instrumentalist, and product-oriented conception of empathy. As an example, I suggest two alternative conceptions of empathy in engineering: 1) empathy as a commitment to communicating and understanding across different cultural and epistemic communities; and 2) empathy as a professional excellence for engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program conducted through virtual working environment. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, REU 2021 activities were conducted online through Canvas and Zoom communication platforms. The major aim of this program is to provide undergraduate students with experiences in engineering education research (i.e., education research in the context of engineering). This paper provides an overview of the program, and briefly describes the virtual working environment, and students' research experiences during the 10-week program. A total of 11 undergraduate students, seven graduate mentors, and seven faculty mentors have actively participated in the program. The program is conducted in two phases: Phases 1 (i.e., Weeks 1-2) and 2 (i.e., Weeks 3-10). Phase 1 consists of preparatory and foundational work that is delivered to participants and will allow them to begin Phase 2 with some educational research foundation already established. The results of the project evaluation show that the program has made a positive impact on increasing education research skills and communication skills of the participating REU students. The participating REU students reported that the research projects they worked on increased their motivation and confidence for continuing to engage in engineering education research. Four participants (i.e., 36.4% of the total participants) suggested that, if available, they would prefer face-to-face over a virtual REU program. Another four participants (i.e., 36.4%) felt that both face-to-face and virtual would offer the same quality of research experiences, and 3 participants (i.e., 27.2% of the total participants) voiced their preference of virtual over face-to-face REU program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Engineering Education Research (EER) Peer Review Training (PERT) project, which is designed to develop EER scholars' peer review skills through mentored reviewing experiences. Supported by the National Science Foundation, the overall programmatic goals of the PERT project are to establish and evaluate a mentored reviewer program for 1) EER journal manuscripts and 2) EER grant proposals. Concurrently, the project seeks to explore how EER scholars develop schema for evaluating EER scholarship, whether these schema are shared in the community, and how schema influence recommendations made to journal editors during the peer review process. To accomplish these goals, the PERT project leveraged the previously established Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) Mentored Reviewer Program, where two researchers with little reviewing experience are paired with an experienced mentor to complete three manuscript reviews collaboratively. In this paper we report on focus group and exit survey findings from the JEE Mentored Reviewer Program and discuss revisions to the program in response to those findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) project described in this paper is grounded in our understanding of the realities of professional practices. Engineers must be able to construct and participate in sound judgments that balance complex, competing objectives or constraints, and they must simultaneously produce recognizable engineering identities that enable them to articulate and justify those judgments to others through a variety of communication mechanisms, including writing. Consequently, the objective of our project isto investigate the ways students produce engineer identities in written artifacts through which they expect to be recognized as engineers. We divided the project into two phases: Phase 1 involving semi-structured interviews designed to conceptualize the engineering judgment process using thematic analysis; Phase 2 involving the design and dissemination of pedagogical approaches based on our results. This paper primarily reports the preliminary results of Phase 1. This project is an instrumental case study using semi-structured artifact-based interviews as the primary data source. Our semi-structured interviews are designed to focus on the ways students construct engineering judgments and produce engineer identities through their written projects. Course documents (including assignments and related material) as well as reflective field notes and analytic memos are used to provide additional contextual data. The data from this project provide a foundation for an understanding of engineering judgment that conceptualizes students as decision makers who participate in acts of engineering judgment. These judgments may be constructed individually, or constructed jointly through the interactions of multiple individuals working in teams to navigate ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting objectives. Moreover, our project situates engineering judgment as an interplay among several interdependent cognitive processes, and shows how the theories of identity as in interpretive lens, academic literacies, identity production, and naturalistic decision making can help to explain how undergraduate students come to view themselves as professionals capable of participating in acts of engineering judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Partnership for Equity: STEM (P4E) is a collaborative project funded by the NSF IUSE program. Four partner institutions have been working together for the past five years to develop, implement, and assess curriculum activities to enlighten students attending required undergraduate engineering and computer science courses about the relevance and importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the fields of engineering and computer science. As the P4E project nears completion, we use this poster session and accompanying paper to reflect on what we have learned during the past five years. We focus on the surprises we encountered during the course of the project in the hopes that the pleasant surprises can be replicated with intention and the unpleasant surprises avoided by others who travel a similar path. "Surprise" is a personal emotion in response to something unexpected, thus this reaction varies with a priori held beliefs. For this paper we decided to present verbatim reflections from project team members. This unique format allows us to enact some of the diversity and inclusion lessons we have tried to teach students over the past five years. The format also acknowledges that while none of the surprises documented here were in fact surprising to all the authors, individually we each had experiences that violated our expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site was established in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Dakota State University (NDSU) with funding from the National Science Foundation Division of Engineering Education and Centers (NSF Award #1953102). The site focused on civil engineering instruction around the theme of mitigating natural disasters for secondary education (6th to 12th grade) teachers. Eight local teachers and one pre-service teacher (who comprised the first cohort) were provided with a sixweek long authentic research experience during the summer, which they translated into a handson curriculum for their classrooms during the 2021-2022 academic year. Partnerships were developed between the host institution, area teachers and local partners from civil engineering industries. This paper will summarize the lessons learned by the authors as well as the effectiveness of the program activities to accomplish two objectives: (1) provide a deeper understanding of civil engineering and (2) develop better abilities among secondary education teachers to prepare future science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leaders. Several strengths were identified by the authors as they reflected on the summer activities including the successes in creating strong connections between the teachers, faculty members and graduate students, and the industry partners as well as the agility of the core research team to overcome unexpected challenges. However, the reflections also revealed several areas for improvement that would increase the accessibility of the site to underserved and/or underrepresented teacher populations, better utilize the resources available and in general, improve the quality of the program and curriculum developed by the teachers. Included within this paper are suggestions that the authors would make to improve current and future RET sites. All of the teachers agreed or strongly agreed that their participation in the RET program increased their knowledge of STEM topics and specifically, civil engineering topics. The participants agreed to varying extents that they will use the information they learned from the program to teach their students and will implement the new strategies they gained to promote increased student learning about STEM topics. Furthermore, the feedback that they provided corroborated some of the same changes the authors plan to implement. [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]

This paper presents an overview of teacher professional development work conducted as part of a National Science Foundation Research in the Formation of Engineers project. The overall goal of the project is to increase awareness and preparedness of rural and indigenous youth to consider and pursue engineering and engineering related careers. To reach this goal, we are working with elementary pre and in-service teachers in rural and reservation communities to connect local funds of knowledge with classroom curriculum. The first summer professional development focused on two items: (1) training elementary teachers and pre-service teachers in ethnographic methods and photo journal elicitation, and (2) introducing teachers to different ways to integrate engineering instruction into their teaching. The current paper focuses on the second summer professional development phase. During this second professional development phase, which was designed to build upon the foundation built during the first summer, the emphasis was on supporting participating teachers' development and implementation of community-focused engineering curricula. The second summer teacher professional development was presented in a blended manner using both asynchronous and synchronous meetings platforms to support collaboration. Participating teachers came to the synchronous meetings with a list of potential topics that could be used to connect engineering to their local school community. During the synchronous sessions, teachers worked with project team members to further develop these ideas and plan for lesson implementation the following academic year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the makerspace movement has transformed engineering education by providing students with open access to equipment and workspaces where they can develop their problem-solving skills, collaborate with other students, and gain confidence in their abilities. However, some literatures suggests that many makerspace environments do not readily support diverse populations, can create tensions between different student groups, and can sometimes feel exclusive and unwelcoming. In addition, non-dominate students often develop negative perceptions of makerspace culture due to gender bias and marginalization. It is essential that academic makerspaces are welcoming and that all students feel a sense of belonging in these spaces, as a greater sense of belonging in students leads to increased persistence and student success, especially for non-dominate student populations. Funded through the NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program, this project seeks to increase student sense of belonging in undergraduate engineering students through the integration of social engagement activities into an academic makerspace. Social engagement activities, in this context, are events, projects, discussions, and workshops that have a strong emphasis on supporting the social and emotional development of students. Supporting students' social and emotional development is an essential component to creating culturally competent, well-rounded engineers. Due to the flexible and informal nature of the makerspace environment, it is an ideal place to build and create these social connections between students. The engagement activities were designed to encourage students of all backgrounds, majors, and ability levels to participate in the makerspace as they build connections with their peers. To encourage connection with peers, the engagement activities were supported and directed by major-level students who were hired as Student Engagement Liaisons (SELs)." This paper summarizes the development of the social engagement activities and reports on participation, student engagement, and student perspectives of the activities. Working closely with the project PI, the SELs worked together to design, develop, and conduct five social engagement activities: (1) Halloween DIY Night, (2) Inclusion Discussion, (3) Holiday Crafts, (4) Game Night & Innovative Workspaces, and (5) Spring Craft Night. For each activity, student participation counts were recorded, and post-event evaluations were collected from the SELs. Overall, engagement activities have been successful from the standpoint of student participation and engagement. The paper highlights several lessons learned and plans for future events. The next phase of the project will assess the impact that these activities have on student sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mechanics of Materials course is an entry-level class required for several engineering majors such as Civil, Mechanical, Biomedical, Material Science, and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Connecticut. The course has a large enrollment of 100 students per section with a total of 400 students per academic year. A recent study evaluated the impact of using real-life examples by asking students to share images of engineering concepts. It has been found that while this activity benefits the learning of students, only a small group of students was motivated to actively participate. It was hypothesized that the single-domain approach relying on photography skills as the main interest of students is a limiting factor in broadening the participation of students. The course was re-designed in the summer of 2020 as part of a research project funded by the Engineering Education Center of the National Science Foundation to create an inclusive learning environment that empowers neurodiverse learners. The strength-based approach was adopted for the course to enable students to express their learning through their interests and strengths in different dimensions. In the academic year of 2020-2021, a series of optional small strength-based projects (SBP) were added to the course to further improve student engagement and participation. Students were able to contribute to the course based on their personal interests and expertise. Students were prompted to identify one or more areas of interest such as photography, drawing, filming, sports, programming, game design, comedy, woodworking, cooking, planting, poetry, reading, or puzzles. After students identified their area of interest, the instructor assigned individual, or group projects aligned with the students' interests and course content. In the first cohort (fall 2020), more than 25% of students participated in this activity compared to 5% in the previous single-mode approach. The participants created unique projects that are being used as learning materials in the course. In the second cohort (fall 2021) more than 40% have participated. This paper discusses the observations from this pilot implementation, the impact of strength-based projects on the students' engagement, and the improvement in the students' learning experience. A survey was used to collect the participants' feedback on whether this activity reinforced their sense of inclusion and improved their skills related to the implementation of their knowledge in real-life problems. A second survey collected data on student's perceptions of the extent to which the strength-based projects allowed them to draw on their strengths and the adequacy of support received for completing them. Modifications have been made to the structure of these strength-based projects in the academic year of 2021-2022 to enhance the students' experience and improve the quality of the projects. The changes, expected outcomes, and results of the survey from both cohorts are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number, variety, and acceptance of computer-aided design (CAD) certifications has significantly increased over the last decade with minimal research conducted on their impact. The purpose of this research paper is to describe the perceived value and benefits of the SOLIDWORKS certification program for students and working professionals within the United States SOLIDWORKS community. The SOLIDWORKS certification program, which began in 1998, recently surpassed 500,000 certified users worldwide. It is viewed as a supplier of worldwide, industry-recognized, lifelong nonconforming professional certifications. Survey data from 193 individuals across five geographical regions of the United States indicate that a SOLIDWORKS certification is valuable and provides benefit to the certified user. This paper presents a novel method of data collection, provides details concerning the actual value and benefits of certifications, and discusses areas of future research as it relates to CAD certifications. [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 driving forces changing how we work and the jobs that we do are impacting organizations of all sizes across all sectors. The global pandemic has accelerated the pace of change and disruption to a level not experienced before. The combination of Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and COVID-19 are creating a new sense of urgency to drive collaboration between industry and education. In 2022, academic institutions offer three paths to prospective engineering students, which students qualify for via standardized testing; Path 1) 4-year bachelor degrees with "R1" research focus: typically following on to postgraduate degrees and careers in research or academia. Path 2) 2-year associate degree (community college): typically leading to a career based on a technical skill or trade. Path 3) 4-year bachelor degree with industry focus: typically leading to careers in technicalbased industries. This paper presents a new approach to the "third path," the industry-based bachelor degrees. The new approach is an alternative to the traditional programs currently offered by the majority of engineering schools in the United States. The traditional academic approach is failing to fill the talent pipeline. Academic policies and practices are unable to keep pace with the exponential growth of technology, the evolving motivations of a four-generation workforce (soon to be 5 generation) and the unpredictable development of new engineering business models [1-4]. The global competitiveness of the United States is at risk, the stakes are too high to stay on the traditional course. The authors contend that paths 1 and 2, despite shortcomings of their own, are in far better shape than the third path, so they are not addressed in this paper. This paper, written more like a position paper, proposes a new model for the third path; it is based on extensive research that was discussed in prior publications by the same authors [10,11,24-26]. The Third Path model proposes revised roles for the four key stakeholders involved in undergraduate engineering and technical education. The stakeholders are: 1) Industry (United States), 2) Academic institutions, 3) Federal and State Governments, and most importantly 4) nextgeneration student-engineers and technicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems engineering management (SEM) focuses on designing, integrating, and managing systems over time using different skills and business concepts to improve the system's performance. System engineering management skills are essential when improving the performance and efficiency of the system. Systems engineers use knowledge from many different disciplines when working with people and companies to enhance the performance of a system. Various aspects of management in systems engineering include planning and control, risk management, configuration management, decision management, project management, quality management, and information management. Some of these techniques are performed individually; however, others may be applied collaboratively in a group setting. In this paper, we will assess undergraduate students' (UG) "systems engineering management skills (SEMS)" based on a newly designed valid, and reliable instrument. First, we assess why it is imperative to develop effective management skills for undergraduate students. Second, we introduce a newly developed instrument that could appraise undergraduate students' state of systems engineering management skills. Finally, the validation and reliability assessment of the instrument was performed followed by multiple group statistical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational or numerical methods classes in engineering have traditionally included topics on algorithm and computer program development as a means for students to learn the numerical methods techniques that are most frequently encountered in engineering applications. This paper describes the inclusion of topics and methods focused on helping students get acquainted with the current state of numerical modeling, data handling, visualization, code versioning, and high-end computing they are likely to see in the workplace. Over the course of several semesters the co-authors have endeavored to bring these topics to a junior-level computational methods course at a primarily undergraduate institution with five ABET-accredited engineering programs, four of which take this course for either required or elective credit. Specifically, the paper addresses the integration of the following modern tools: the Python programming language, including numpy and the matplotlib modules, the git and github distributed code versioning system, and jupyter notebooks running on a supercomputer cluster for lecture notes distribution and for coding and documenting homework and projects. The paper reports details on the implementation of these modern tools, including successes and failures, and student perspectives. In addition, we detail our attempts to address and automate quizzing and testing in a hybrid virtual environment, in which some students are attending class in person and some are attending remotely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]