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Background: Mental health issues reported among college‐aged individuals have increased. Prevalence of these issues has an established impact on students' personal, professional, and academic outcomes. Graduate students experience unique stressors that impact their mental health. In particular, engineering graduate students have lower help‐seeking tendencies, which can impact the severity and length of their mental health problems. Purpose: We investigate the literature concerning engineering graduate students' mental health, focusing on academic outcomes, mental health measures, and mental health findings, to highlight gaps in current literature and the need for further research. Scope/Method: Five research databases, EBSCO: CINAHL, EBSCO: PsycINFO, ProQuest: ERIC, PubMed, and Scopus, were searched in a scoping literature review. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied during the screening process. Peer‐reviewed publications (i.e., articles and conference papers) were identified and coded for study focus, keywords, participants and institution(s), journal discipline, study type, methods used, and work referenced, in addition to academic outcomes, mental health measures, and mental health findings. Results: Nineteen of the 4,826 unique studies identified were included in the review. Ten academic outcomes and 13 mental health measures were discussed. Mental health findings were grouped into five themes: social support and sense of belonging; student–advisor relationship; cultural barriers faced by international students; gender and racial stereotypes; and generalized findings. Conclusions: Research on engineering graduate students' mental health is limited. Given that mental health has direct ties to students' well‐being and ultimately their success, engineering education researchers should focus on studying students' experiences, sharing these findings, and communicating best practices for all stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a design-based research project undertaken to test and implement an interest-based engineering challenges framework for pre-college students. This work is motivated by the need for innovative engineering education practices in pre-college settings, and making engineering more inclusive for people from diverse backgrounds. The design-based research methodology can be challenging to implement as it comprises of multiple, cyclical research activities that provide challenges in documenting and communicating the larger study's progress. This paper presents findings from this continuously evolving study, and also the design and implementation of this design-based research at roughly the halfway point for a four-year study. Each of the consequent versions scaffold to answer the broader research questions of the study pertaining to: engineering appealing to students' personal interests, empowering underrepresented groups to find meaningful connections to engineering, leading more authentic engagement in engineering and design practices, and improving students' attitudes and perception of engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation and reuse of previous design solutions, or precedents, is central to design. This paper describes qualitative research conducted over three years at two institutions, aimed at investigating the role of design knowledge re-use in project-based mechanical design courses. Research data were collected through participant observation, student interviews, anonymous questionnaires, and website analytics. The paper identifies challenges that must be addressed in order to support novice engineers in rehearsing the types of knowledge required to successfully reason about and engage with design precedents. Two categories of design precedents are identified: concept precedents and detail precedents. Providing students with access to the latter is identified as a particular challenge, as is providing students with access to engineering communities of practice. Approaches to addressing these challenges are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional bodies expect engineers to show competence in both mathematics and engineering topics such as mechanics, using their abilities in both of these to solve problems. Yet within engineering programmes there is a phenomenon known as ‘The Mathematics Problem’, with students not demonstrating understanding of the subject. This paper will suggest that students are constructing different concept images in engineering and mathematics, based on their perception of either the use or exchange-value for the topics. Using a mixed methods approach, the paper compares 10 different types of concept image constructed by students, which suggests that familiar procedural images are preferred in mathematics. In contrast strategic and conceptual images develop for mechanics throughout the years of the programme, implying that different forms of competence are being constructed by students between the two subjects. The paper argues that this difference is attributed to the perceived use-value of mechanics in the career of the engineer, compared to the exchange-value associated with mathematics. Questions are raised about the relevance of current definitions of competence given that some routine mathematical operations previously performed by engineers are now being replaced by technology, in the new world of work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question 'What do you understand by mathematical creativity?'. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that 'problem solving' category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were 'involving mathematics' category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for 'problem solving' and 'involving mathematics' categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional spatial skills are a cognitive ability that have been shown to predict success in engineering. Michigan Tech has been offering a course to help students improve their 3-D spatial skills for more than two decades. In previous studies, students who failed a rotations test and enrolled in the course performed better on a number of measures when compared to those who failed the rotations test and did not enrol in the course. A valid criticism of these studies was that the two groups were self-selected. Beginning in 2009, the spatial skills course became a requirement for students who initially failed the rotations test. This paper reports on the results from a longitudinal study conducted to determine the impact of the spatial skills course when no self-selection is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics has long been known to be problematic for university engineering students and their teachers, for example, Scanlan.[1] This paper presents recent data gathered from interviews with engineering students who experienced problems with mathematics and their lecturers during their transition through the first year in different programme contexts. Our interviews with the students reveal how they understand the relation between engineering and mathematics and we draw on the concept of ‘use- and exchange-value’ to explore this relationship more fully. This paper challenges both the pedagogical practice of teaching non-contextualized mathematics and the lack of transparency regarding the significance of mathematics to engineering. We conclude that the value of mathematics in engineering remains a central problem, and argue that mathematics should be a fundamental concern in the design and practice of first-year engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the twenty-first century, meeting our technological challenges demands educational excellence, a skilled populace that is ready for the critical challenges society faces. There is widespread consensus, however, that education systems are failing to adequately prepare all students with the essential twenty-first century knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in life, career, and citizenship. The purpose of this paper is to understand how twenty-first century knowledge and skills can be appropriately embedded in engineering education finalised to innovative product development by using additive manufacturing (AM). The study designs a learning model by which to achieve effective AM education to address the requirements of twenty-first century and to offer students the occasion to experiment with STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) concepts. The study is conducted using the quality function deployment (QFD) methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at presenting the experience of the Power Conversion project in teaching students to design a proof-of-principle contactless energy transfer system for the charging of electrical vehicles. The Power Conversion is a second-year electrical engineering (EE) project in which students are to gather and apply EE knowledge to design and test a system. This system is to work with power level and operates independent from an electricity grid. The instructional method used in this project is design-based learning (DBL). As an educational approach, DBL is to support students to gather and apply knowledge inopen-endedassignments. The set-up of the project has gone through different modifications and iterations in three consecutive years regarding the organisation and supervision of the students. We have analysed the students’ design products in the past three academic years in order to evaluate whether the project set-up and supervision have influenced students’ designs. Results indicate that theopen-endedcharacter of the project has a positive influence on the designs especially regarding the criteria on efficiency, Maximum Power Point Tracking algorithm and power tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]