Search

Within the Master's course "Civil Engineering" at TU Darmstadt, a project has to be carried out. In the winter term 2018/2019 this was the design and fabrication of a bridge spanning 6 m and made entirely from paper. Students had to find bridge types suitable for the use of paper, develop and optimise cross sections and bracing systems and furthermore prove the load bearing capacity. This included the use of experimental methods explicitly. Finally, the bridge had to be erected crossing a small creek. No materials other than paper, cardboard and glue were allowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it really better to print everything, including software models, or is it better to view them on screen? With the ever increasing complexity of software systems, software modeling is integral to software development. Software models facilitate and automate many activities during development, such as code and test case generation. However, a core goal of software modeling is to communicate and collaborate. Software models are presented to team members on many mediums and two of the most common mediums are paper and computer screens. Reading from paper or screen is ostensibly considered to have the same effect on model comprehension. However, the literature on text reading has indicated that the reading experiences can be very different which in turn effects various metrics related to reader performance. This paper reports on an experiment that was conducted to investigate the effect of reading software models on paper in comparison with reading them on a computer screen with respect to cognitive effectiveness. Cognitive effectiveness here refers to the ease by which a model reader can read a model. The experiment used a total of 74 software engineering students as subjects. The experiment results provide strong evidence that displaying diagrams on a screen allows subjects to read them quicker. There is also evidence that indicates that on screen viewing induces fewer reading errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is an important skill for engineers but many students face a lack of experience in idea generation, often compounded by low-self efficacy towards creativity. Providing students with online training modules has been suggested as one solution. However, the literature demonstrates using a computer can influence performance and self-efficacy in a different manner to using pen-and-paper. There is a current lack of research on whether computers may influence self-efficacy during idea generation tasks. Two experiments involving computer-based and pen-and-paper groups were designed. Groups were provided with templates that guided them through the process of applying an idea generation technique and were given sixteen minutes to generate ideas to solve a presented problem. Results revealed that students' performance was similar and using a computer does not negatively influence self-efficacy. This shows that students can engage in idea generation learning tasks using computer-based modes without negatively influencing performance or self-efficacy, suggesting an avenue for educators to engage students with building creativity skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the evaluation of the alpha version of a gamified tool called Call for Papers: The Game (CfP:TG), specially designed for teaching scientific writing in the training of future engineers. A non-probabilistic convenience sampling was carried out with the participation of engineering students from a Peruvian public university. The short version of the user experience questionnaire (UEQ) was applied, and usability was qualitatively evaluated. The main results indicate that the Pragmatic Quality of CfP:TG is in the neutral range with a value of 0.729, and the Hedonic Quality receives a positive evaluation with a value of 1.089. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A concern that has been raised with the transition from pen and paper examinations to electronic examinations is whether this will make cheating easier. This article investigates how teachers and students perceive the differences in ease of cheating during three types of written examination: paper exams, bring your own device e-exams and e-exams using university-owned devices. It also investigates perceptions about the effectiveness of some typical countermeasures towards cheating across these examination types. A mixed-method approach was used, combining questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers in the authors' own university. A total of 212 students and 162 teachers participated in the questionnaire survey, and then, a more limited number were interviewed to get a deeper understanding of the results. Six-different cheating practices were considered – impersonation, forbidden aids, peeking, peer collaboration, outside assistance and student–staff collusion and seven different countermeasures were considered – proctors, biometry, mingling, shuffling, random drawing, sequencing and broadcasting. Both students and teachers perceived cheating as easier with e-exams, and especially with bring your own device. They also thought some countermeasures would be easier to implement with e-exams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a need for further studies on students' learning of Differential Equations (DEs), especially in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. Research on the mathematical education of engineers shows a conflict between students' demands for practical, contextualized pedagogies and the need for abstract reasoning and appropriate use of mathematical results. Few papers focus on engineering students' interpretation of theorems and their use as tools in argumentation and problem-solving. This paper takes a sociocultural stance on learning and employs dialogical inquiry – a methodology rooted in Bakhtinian theory, newly developed for collaborative inquiry and qualitative data analysis – to investigate the meanings that senior engineering students made while working on a task designed to evaluate their understanding of Existence and Uniqueness Theorems (EUTs) of solutions of DEs. We identified two important epistemological disconnections that explain the difficulties that some of our students faced in making meaning of solutions of DEs and the EUT. • There is a need for more studies on the learning of Differential Equations (DEs). • Few research papers focus on students' meaning-making of theoretical results in DEs. • Dialogical inquiry methodology was used to analyze students' meaning-making processes. • Two epistemological disconnections were found that explain students' difficulties. • The use of warrants in students' dialogue was important in their meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective communication is pivotal to professional success in civil engineering. However, rural students often face unique challenges in mastering oral communication, especially in English. This study seeks to examine the challenges faced by engineering students from rural backgrounds when speaking English and the underlying reasons for these difficulties. This paper implemented specific tasks inspired by task-based language teaching methodology in the study of participants to analyze their speaking challenges and their root causes. The findings revealed that speaking English posed challenges primarily due to fear of errors, anxiety, shyness and low confidence levels. This paper proposes solutions, such as creating a supportive environment and promoting regular English communication, to address these issues. The research highlights the transformative impact of effective communication and calls for further studies to refine and expand these educational strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attending in-class paper demonstrations and performing experiments in solid mechanics courses are very effective ways for students to gain an understanding of the complicated concepts of mechanics. This paper explores a few applications of dogbone tensile tests, stress concentrations and crack kinking or mixed-mode fracture. Furthermore, this handy technique can be extended to other broader areas of mechanics education. Since only simple materials and supplies are used, copy paper, staples, scissors and a paper punching machine, students can repeat these typical mechanics experiments in future in other locations, such as in an office or at home. Therefore, this simple and effective technique can have a remarkable influence on the student's long-term career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem-solving is a key engineering skill, yet is an area in which engineering graduates underperform. This paper investigates the potential of using web-based tools to teach students problem-solving techniques without the need to make use of class time. An idea generation experiment involving 90 students was designed. Students were surveyed about their study habits and reported they use electronic-based materials more than paper-based materials while studying, suggesting students may engage with web-based tools. Students then generated solutions to a problem task using either a paper-based template or an equivalent web interface. Students who used the web-based approach performed as well as students who used the paper-based approach, suggesting the technique can be successfully adopted and taught online. Web-based tools may therefore be adopted as supplementary material in a range of engineering courses as a way to increase students’ options for enhancing problem-solving skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: The importance of thriving is well-established, but little is known about thriving for undergraduate engineering students. We introduce engineering thriving as the process by which engineering students develop optimal functioning in undergraduate engineering programs. Since thriving is currently underexplored in the engineering education literature, we investigated the larger body of literature on engineering student success. Purpose: We introduce the concept of engineering thriving to synthesize the largely discrete existing bodies of literature on engineering student success to bring together many different perspectives, methodological approaches, and findings that shape our understanding of engineering thriving. Our work on thriving unites disparate lines of research on engineering student success, challenges the assumption that addressing barriers automatically leads to success, and strives to change the way engineering education views student success. Scope/Method: We used the scoping literature review method to investigate papers on undergraduate engineering student success. Four databases were searched, yielding 726 initial papers that studied separate dimensions of engineering student success, such as academic, personal, cognitive, and behavioral. We integrated the relationships among these dimensions to develop an understanding of engineering thriving. Our final analysis included 68 papers after removing duplicates and applying selection criteria. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that an engineering student thriving includes multiple dimensions of success, involves cyclical processes of growth and adaptation, and consists of synergistic competencies that should ideally be studied together with as many other competencies as possible. These findings support the conclusion that engineering thriving can be understood as helping students manage constantly changing internal and external factors within the broader engineering education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions are used to obtain information, stimulate thinking, and redirect reasoning. Academics in higher education use questions on a daily basis to stimulate thinking and reasoning in students. Final examination papers are used by academics to assess the retention and application skills of students. The assumption, however, exists that questions relating to application skills at universities of technology should start to dominate the higher academic levels in education, with a subsequent drop in questions regarding retention skills. These questions may be categorized as either higher order or lower order questions. This article attempts to distinguish between these two types of questions in light of Bloom's taxonomy, with similar concepts such as deep and surface learning being examined. The literature review is applied to an electrical engineering module titled Electronics, which serves as the case study. The results of this study indicate that a high percentage of the final examination papers dealt with the objective "Application," where students had to make use of numerous mathematical equations to solve various unknowns. The results also indicated that academics in electronics are using more lower order than higher order questions in their final examination papers. A balance is suggested between these two types of questions for various academic levels at universities of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the application of visual-spatial skills in academic disciplines, vocational fields and daily life is becoming more and more prominent, it is of great theoretical and practical significance how to make use of big data and artificial intelligence technology to conduct research on the relationship between visual-spatial skills and students' grades. This paper explores and analyses from the perspective of artificial intelligence, combining students' visual-spatial skills and students' specific attribute characteristics to construct an expert system, which defines the prediction of academic performance as a classification problem corresponding to the five categories of excellent, good, moderate, passing, and weak, respectively, and based on which a deep neural network-based classification prediction model for students' performance is designed. The experimental results show that visual-spatial skills plays an important role in the professional learning of science and engineering students, while the classification model designed in this paper has high accuracy in the grade prediction process. This paper not only helps to fill the gaps in the current research field, but is also expected to provide scientific basis for educational practice and promote the development of the education field in a more intelligent and personalized direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional engineering education (Eng. Ed) has received criticism for restricting student learning and experiences to practical skills development while ignoring the significance of fostering cognitive skills that encourage higher order thinking, criticality, and self-reflexivity. Imaginative education (IE) has emerged as a consideration for replacing such skills focused engineering curricula with interactive, engaging, and student-centered pedagogical approaches. However, existing literature on the topic as well as Egan's (1997) own explanation of the five stages of understanding (somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic) are mainly focused on K-12 contexts, leaving limited resources and insights for higher education contexts. This calls for theoretical and practical expansion of the topic where development and implementation of IE-informed Eng. Ed for adult engineering students remain the focus. To respond to this call, this conceptual paper focuses on two main points. First, it attempts to unpack the theoretical underpinnings of the five stages of IE to understand what each stage means for educators and learners in higher education engineering contexts. Second, after outlining the challenges that traditional Eng. Ed is facing in a globalized world today and the initiatives from the field to address them, it discusses the promises IE can bring to make Eng. Ed more effective, inclusive, and relevant. Overall, the intention in this paper is to turn to the theoretical tensions that may emerge when considering IE as an approach to re-imagine and expand Eng. Ed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing an abstract is a challenging assignment for graduate students as it requires condensing all the extensive research into a few sentences, providing sufficient background knowledge, and presenting findings compellingly to the academic community. This study observes how graduate engineering students cope with writing their abstracts for their first published papers, with a specific focus on metadiscourse. The study is based on the learner corpus of 1,746 abstracts (117,535 words) written by non-native English speakers in English and Serbian during their Master's studies. The research follows Hyland's taxonomy, focusing on interactive frame markers and interactional engagement markers, together with metadiscursive nouns in order to uncover cross-linguistic patterns and pedagogical implications. The comparison of the absolute and relative frequency with statistical significance and log likelihood between Serbian and English sub-corpora demonstrates that students tend to use frame markers with greater frequency in Serbian abstracts than in English ones. Additionally, engagement markers, and especially directives, are used twice as often as frame markers in both sub-corpora, with a higher prevalence in English abstracts. Following the qualitative and quantitative analyses, the findings offer pedagogical implications related to the range of frame markers and metadiscursive nouns used by students to introduce their research aims and the range of engagement markers used to engage readers in their research and thus claim their credibility in academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Problem solving practice involving paper-and-pencil solutions is a common activity in undergraduate engineering training. This paper addresses three questions: What indicators of problem-solving skill are available in paper-and-pencil solutions, beyond a simple accuracy measure? Can these indicators distinguish between problem solvers in terms of their skill level? How can these indicators be used to improve the effectiveness of instructor feedback to problem-solving exercises? PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS) Based on the published literature on cognition and problem solving, several indicators were hypothesized to signal knowledge and skill: an accurate free-body diagram, specification of assumptions, accurate expansion of key principles, strategic (forward) inferences, and checking equations and solutions. DESIGN/METHOD A mixed experimental methodology was applied that combined qualitative and quantitative analyses. The qualitative data was comprised of paper-and-pencil solutions and video recordings of participants while they solved problems. Frequency counts of skill indicators and grader-assigned scores comprised the quantitative data. RESULTS Statistical tests confirmed that the hypothesized indicators were associated with individuals' level of skill. However, reliable evidence for these indicators was only partially found in the paper-and-pencil solutions and could only be firmly established by including data from the video recordings. CONCLUSIONS The results show that paper-and-pencil solutions can be diagnostic of the strengths and weaknesses of problem-solvers. However, to provide useful and reliable feedback to students, these solutions must be supplemented with additional input, possibly through regular structured sampling throughout a course, or through more extensive use of computer resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research refers to the assigning of a hands-on group project to freshman engineering students, evaluating their performance, and deriving conclusions on student benefits and educational advances. The research procedure included action plans for the instructor and the students, instructions to the students on performing the work, organizational instructions to the teams and reporting guidelines, and evaluation of the success of the project. The main outcomes refer to the team co-operation, the performance of tasks, the quality of results and the reporting effectiveness. The ‘paper beam’ project benefited the student’s learning and proved the need of complementary learning styles in teams, of the appreciation of quality performance and results, as well as of the accuracy in project details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to show how graduated engineering students in classical ICT view practically the advent of the QIT. The students do their theses in El.Eng. and ICT and were asked how to implement now or in the future the QIT in their current or future work. Most of them have strictly defined research topics and in some cases the realization stage is advanced. Thus, most of the potential QIT application areas are defined and quite narrow. In such a case, the issue to be considered is the incorporation of QIT components and interfaces into the existing ICT infrastructure, software and hardware alike, and propose a solution as a reasonable functional hybrid system. The QIT components or circuits are not standalone in most cases, they should be somehow incorporated into existing environment, with a measurable added value. Not an easy task indeed. We have to excuse the students if the proposed solutions are not ripe enough. The exercise was proposed as an on-purpose publication workshop, related strictly to the fast and fascinating development of the QIT. The paper is a continuation of publishing exercises with previous groups of students participating in QIT lectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educator's choice of techniques is intended to foster a strong love of learning. The different methods of learning can improve learners' abilities. The need of pupils to learn cannot be met by only conventional teaching. When pupils graphically answer the provided question, this is clearly seen. This paper studied students' performance for the graph based topic 'Smith Chart' for the course 'Radar and Microwave Engineering' for the third year of engineering students. Total 64 students of the same class considered for the experiment. Video based learning (VBL) is methodology is used in this paper. Total 64 students learn the said chart (Smith Chart) through videos. VBL along with collaborative approach is carried out for experimental group. The two group posttest is carried out. The two group post test results presented in the paper. The assessment is carried out w.r.to Learning Outcomes (LO) and Bloom's Level (BL). The objectives of the study are to introduce and make students understand Smith chart (BL: Understand, LO1); to determine transmission line parameters and impedance along the line (BL: Apply, LO2); to examine the effect of load variations on transmission line parameters. (BL: Analyze, LO3). The results w.r.to LOs and BL are presented in this paper for both control and experimental group. To assess the level of effectiveness of the intervention feedback is taken from experimental group. Almost 96% students liked the activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concentrates on the work by Petrus van Musschenbroek published in 1729, constituting apparently the first study in the literature on column buckling. To understand the significance of Musschenbroek's contribution, we provide the combined personal, historic and scientific contexts in which he carried out his studies; he was the first researcher to deal with the failure of compressed elements as a new phenomenon. Most unfortunately, his name is not currently known except for a small circle of historians of science, whereas engineering students at present are told that buckling should be associated with the name of Leonhard Euler. We fully share the idea of Benvenuto stating that "Musschenbroek's experimental law is of considerable historical interest." The contributions in his 1729 book are shown not only to include his experimental work but Musschenbroek also devised a design procedure for column buckling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]