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In this paper, we report on a series of research projects that together motivate a larger idea: the design of lightweight, scalable, and relational learning experiences for overcoming system-level challenges in education. We start by discussing Exploratory Reading Groups, a program designed to expose students to the creative aspects of computer science and to enhance intrinsic motivation and purpose for learning through exploratory reading of research papers. Unlike traditional graduate student reading groups which focus on depth, our reading groups are designed for a broad exploration of ideas. More importantly for this paper, they are designed to be lightweight in time commitment, to be scalable and student-driven, and to foster supportive peer relationships. As we ran this program, we found that these design parameters not only led to our original goal of supporting creative exploration, but also resulted in the unexpected emergent benefit of facilitating student entry into undergraduate research experiences. There were three reasons for this. First, the lightweight nature of the program (~1-2 hours a week for 4 weeks) lowered entry barriers for busy students. Second, the scalable and student-driven nature of the program circumvented the obstacles of limited faculty time or staff resources common to many programs. Third, the relational nature of the program facilitated knowledge sharing and relational networks that helped to overcome the many systemic misalignments at the root of faculty-perceived barriers to undergraduate research, findings that came out of a series of interviews we conducted with STEM faculty on barriers to undergraduate research. We conclude by proposing that the design of lightweight, scalable, and relational learning experiences may be an effective approach to overcoming system-level challenges in education and discuss a few examples of what that might look like and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity plays an important role in engineering problem solving, particularly when solving an ill-structured problem, and has been a topic of increasing research interest in recent years. Prior research on creativity has been conducted in problem solving settings, predominantly focusing on undergraduate engineering students, including how faculty can foster creativity in engineering students, how engineering faculty perceive their students' creativity, and how to measure it. However, more work is needed to examine engineering faculty and practitioner perspectives on the role of creativity when they solve an engineering problem themselves. Since engineering students learn problem solving, at least initially, mainly from their professors, it is essential to understand how faculty perceive their own creativity in problem solving. Similarly, given that practitioners solve ill-structured engineering problems on a regular basis in the workplace and that most of the students go on to work in the engineering industry when they graduate and ultimately become practitioners, it is also important to explore practitioner perspectives on creativity in problem solving settings. As part of an ongoing NSF-funded study, this paper investigates how engineering faculty's and practitioners' creativity influences their problem solving processes, how their perspectives on creativity in a problem solving environment differ, and what factors impact their creativity. Five tenure-track faculty in civil engineering and five practitioners were interviewed after they solved an ill-structured engineering problem. Participants' responses were transcribed and coded using initial coding. This paper discusses their responses to semi-structured interview questions. The findings suggest that faculty and practitioners feel more creative when they are familiar with the subject area of a problem. If they are aware of a particular solution that has been developed and used before or have access to resources to look them up, they may not necessarily embrace creativity. The findings indicate differences not only across faculty and practitioners but also within the faculty and practitioner participants. Similarities and differences between faculty and practitioners in creative problem solving and the themes that emerged are discussed and recommendations for educators are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the impact of the REU Program at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) on the success of Participants in industry or graduate school. The REU Program titled "Research Experience for Undergraduates in UAV Technologies" has been funded by the NSF's EEC Program. The main goal of the Program is to increase undergraduate students' participation and interest in research on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technologies. Undergraduate students from 2- and 4-year institutions have been involved in a multidisciplinary research projects at Cal Poly Pomona. The REU Site has so far hosted a total of 43 diverse group of students for 8-10 weeks of summer research since 2017, with the projects focusing on research on the Dynamics and Control of UAVs, Collision Detection and Avoidance System for UAVs, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Navigation in GPS-Denied Environments, application of UAVs for search and rescue missions, object detection and tracking, and Flight Test experience. Another goal of the Program is to attract students from community colleges to STEM programs at 4-year institutions and encourage the participants to pursue their studies for graduate degrees. The Program has been tracking the past Participants. Most of the participants are now pursuing their educational or professional career in the area of UAVs and other related areas. The program has also been successful in motivating the Participants to graduate degrees in STEM disciplines. Some of the participants are already pursuing their studies for Master's or PhD degrees or are planning to do so. Information about the Participants' current employment or graduate school enrollment and relevance of current work to aerospace and/or UAV technology was gathered using a follow-up survey that also included open-ended qualitative feedback from the Participants about the long-term impact of the Program on their career. The paper presents the results obtained from the data collected from the Participants of the first three cohorts of the Program who were hosted during summers of 2017 to 2019. The paper focuses on the impact of the Program on the Participants' career choice, career advancement, and motivation for graduate degrees. The paper also presents written feedback/comments from the Participants. [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]

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]

In this paper we describe an NSF-TUSE funded project, which seeks to expose a broad group of undergraduate students to data science methods via already existing introductory undergraduate STEM classes (as opposed to through the creation of entirely new classes). A key component is a novel process, described here, to develop data science modules that naturally fit into such existing STEM classes. This novel process takes most of the development burden off the instructor's shoulders and instead employs collaborative teams of undergraduate and graduate students as well as the PIs in consultation with the instructor. The outcomes of this process are data science modules ready to be infused throughout the undergraduate STEM curriculum. We describe best practices and lessons learned about the module development and deployment process as well as several of the modules and their fit into the curriculum. In this paper we furthermore describe data science experiential learning opportunities for students at more advanced stages of their education. We finish by outlining the methods by which we will be evaluating the effectiveness of both the modules as well as the experiential learning opportunities in exposing students to data science methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to show how graduate engineering students working on Engineeringfor-Community-Development (ECD) projects and theses 1) acquire socio-technical education that prepares them to critically engage with community development (formation); 2) propose to translate their academic scholarship into formats and language that lead to effective engagement and appropriation by the communities they want to serve (translation); and, from this translation, 3) extend their scholarship into curricular opportunities for undergraduate engineers interested in ECD (extension). Traditional graduate engineering training often lacks education about understanding engineering as a socio-technical endeavor while graduate engineering research is often for graduate advisors to be presented in professional conferences, published in academic journals, and eventually contributing to the output of a research lab. Even when graduate engineering education is complemented with ancillary "social" topics like research ethics or professional communication, it often lacks a concerted effort to view engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor, which, as we propose, is a necessary precondition for effective community engagement. Even when the research topic could be relevant to communities or undergraduate engineering students interested in ECD projects, graduate students rarely translate their results into formats and languages understandable by different audiences. For the process of formation, we will outline how graduate students in the Humanitarian Engineering and Science (HES) Program at Colorado School of Mines (Mines) receive education and mentoring in epistemic decolonization where they learn to question the assumptions, knowledge, and methods that engineers from the Global North have used to engage communities from the Global South and the processes through which students frame their research questions, methods, and community engagement. For the process of translation, we will review the literature on "research translation" and propose models for research translation specific to the community contexts in which they are working: recyclers of electronic and construction waste, artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) communities, and houseless communities in need of clean water. For the process of extension, we will review the literature on graduateundergraduate mentoring related to engineering design projects and propose curricular opportunities for involving other engineering students in community development generated from the graduate student research and translation activities. With an increasing number of ECD-related graduate programs appearing in the horizon, there will be an increasing need for effective models for formation, research translation, and extension like those proposed in this paper. This paper hopes to contribute to these emerging needs and the future development of these crucial areas of graduate engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ableism is a barrier to accessible engineering education. Although Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 mandates equal access to postsecondary institutions for people with disabilities, there has been continuous pushback. Improvements have been made through laws, research, and activism, but there are still many steps we must take to further the accessibility of education and inclusion of disabled students. Disabled people make up between 13-26% of the US population, but only 6% of undergraduate students, and 7% of doctoral students with an engineering degree (NCSES). This underrepresentation of disabled students in engineering is likely due to a combination of factors. Studies have shown that disabled students face systemic barriers ranging from a general lack of support to negative views from faculty members. Resources about accessible and inclusive education practices related to the disability community are limited, and educators identified this limitation as a barrier to the support process. There is a clear and present need to ensure that support is implemented in our classrooms and that faculty have the resources to adapt their courses to an accessible format. The goal of this paper is to provide a guide to professors and students on accessible education. This guide will summarize resources and findings from both disability and education research into one cohesive space. I will discuss 10 guidelines, as follows: 1) Provide instructor- and course-specific accessibility and accommodations statements, 2) Meet with students privately about their accommodations, 3) Do not ask students to disclose their disabilities, 4) Consider the implications of language used, 5) Apply principles from Universal Design for Learning in the classroom, 6) Proactively provide accessible materials, 7) Upload notes and class slides and/or recordings, 8) Remove attendance requirements, 9) Solicit feedback from students on how accommodations are working in your class, and 10) Include content from those in the disability community in the curriculum. Adopting these guidelines is just the first step in starting to create a more inclusive and accessible educational environment. In conclusion, accessible education for all is within our power, but resources are needed for 1) disabled individuals and 2) educators. This paper provides guidelines and resources backed by disability and education literature to assist in making education accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper describes engineering students' experiences in an NSF-funded project that partnered undergraduate engineering students with pre-service teachers to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. This project aims to address an apparent gap between what is taught in academia and industry's expectations of engineers to integrate perspectives from outside their field to solve modern societal problems requiring a multidisciplinary approach. Working in small teams over Zoom, participating engineering, education, and fifth grade students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired COVID companion robots. The goal for the engineering students was to build new interprofessional skills, while reinforcing technical skills. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird BitTM hardware (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process (EDP), and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each undergraduate engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their preservice teacher and fifth grade partners. The intervention took place in Spring 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating the investigators to make critical decisions to address challenges of implementing the intervention in an online setting. This paper describes those decisions as it investigates how the cross-disciplinary, mixed-aged collaboration with preservice teachers and fifth graders impacted undergraduate engineering students' learning and investment during the design process of their robots. Preliminary results of a regression analysis revealed a relationship between the engineering students' robot rankings and post-scores on the design process knowledge survey (r = 0.92). Consistencies and a few anomalies in this pattern were explained using qualitative reflections which were analyzed to determine students' level of investment in the project, overall perceptions, and the extent to which they focused on the fifth graders' ideas in their designs. In general, robot quality was linked to both undergraduate engineering students' level of investment and whether they focused on the fifth graders' ideas in their designs. Engineering students' overall perceptions of the project were generally positive, appreciating the role of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations in their learning to brainstorm innovative solutions and interact effectively with professionals outside of engineering as they embark on tackling societal problems in the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper describes a case study of the ways that engineering students demonstrate emerging engineering judgment as they make assumptions needed to model and solve an openended, ill-structured engineering science homework problem. Engineering judgment is the set of practices that engineers employ to develop mathematical models to solve the ill-structured problems encountered by professional engineers. Engineering science homework presents an underutilized opportunity for students to develop and rehearse mathematical modeling and engineering judgment by engaging with ill-structured problems. This study unpacks students' emerging engineering judgment as they identify, make, and revise assumptions to develop mathematical models to solve an ill-structured engineering science homework problem. This study asks: How do these students select, evaluate, and revise assumptions while they develop mathematical models? What do these students take into consideration as they make assumptions to develop mathematical models? We took a case study approach to look closely at the ways students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. This case took place in the context of a Statics course required of second-year engineering students at a large public university. Over fifteen weeks, the focal team of four students worked to model a swimming pool lift capable of assisting a swimmer to enter and exit the water. We identified moments in which students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. In this paper, we describe and present examples of the ways that these students selected, evaluated, and revised assumptions while solving this problem. Our analysis suggests that to make assumptions, these students considered ways to simplify the problem, the instructor's grading practices, materials availability, and system function. We conjecture that the open-ended nature of the focal problem scaffolded students to make assumptions, and that their assumption-making processes were shaped by their perceptions of the problem as both a "real-world" problem and a "school assignment." This study contributes to understanding the development of engineering judgment and points to the potential for illstructured engineering science problems to support students to develop and rehearse engineering judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a Research paper. A large number of students never raise their hand during lectures or go to office hours. This is especially the case for large undergraduate classes. It is hypothesized that many students would benefit from more interaction with an instructor or teaching assistant. This study is part of a larger project of implementing oral exams in undergraduate engineering courses with potential benefits including improved assessment and reduction in academic integrity concerns. In addition to these benefits, this study paper explores whether oral exams can increase student motivation to learn and performance in the class. In this study, 560 engineering students in 6 classes were given oral exams and were surveyed about their experience. In one of the classes with 37 students, a controlled trial was performed with students randomly assigned to 3 groups. After the first written midterm one group had an oral exam with the instructor, one group had an oral exam with the Teaching Assistant (TA), and the last group did not have an oral exam. In the second written midterm the group with the instructor increased their grade by 14%, the group with the TA increased by 3%, and the group with no oral exam had a negligible change in performance. Potential reasons for the larger impact of an oral exam with the instructor were explored with one possibility being increased student motivation. A survey question about student motivation was administered to all 560 students in the study for which a majority of the oral exams were administered by TAs or other Instructional Assistants. Overall 338 students responded to the survey question and 70% of them Strongly Agreed or Agreed that the oral exams increased their motivation to learn. A correlation analysis was run using the demographic data of the students. First generation status had a statistically significant correlation with p=.031, where 78% of first generation students indicated that oral exams increased their motivation to learn compared to 66% for students that are not first generation. Other statistically significant correlations occurred with Cumulative GPA (p=.001) and Term GPA (p=.003), but with a negative correlation coefficient. The students that Strongly Agreed that the oral exam increased their motivation to learn had the lowest GPA (Cumulative GPA = 3.23 and Term GPA=2.89). These 3 statistically significant correlations all indicate that students who may likely benefit from more academic support had a larger increase in motivation following an oral exam. Hypotheses are presented for the reasons for student gains following oral exams, and proposals are made for the roles of Instructional Assistants and instructors in future studies and classroom implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress research paper explores faculty's experiences during their own undergraduate programs, as well as the role of health and wellbeing in their success as students. The culture of stress and hardship promoted in engineering education has been scrutinized as negatively affecting students, especially those from marginalized groups. However, little is currently known about the interactions among multiple actors in the engineering education ecosystem and their contributions to perpetuating such culture. Faculty directly impact students' experiences in engineering programs through first-hand interactions with students. These interactions can propagate professional beliefs and attitudes that our graduates instill and further propagate. Thus, faculty may be re-enacting attitudes that they learned through their own experiences as students. Therefore, their beliefs might bring insights into elements that have been persistent in the engineering education narrative. In this work in progress paper, we use the model of engineering thriving to analyze interviews with four engineering faculty and analyze the transcripts using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. This study is part of a larger project to contribute to the efforts to evolve engineering's current culture of hardship and suffering to one that recognizes health, wellbeing, and thriving permeating essential academic spaces like the classroom. In this project, we seek to understand faculty conceptualizations of health and well-being that developed through their undergraduate and graduate experiences. Our preliminary results show that the undergraduate experiences of faculty included elements of thriving and well-being such as self-knowledge and self-control. Some identified key turning points in realizing their best strategies to maximize their well-being and academic success, which enhanced their decision-making abilities. Furthermore, some participants achieved academic success despite poor well-being and thriving outcomes, which raises questions about the cultural and systemic factors that promote such dualism. In terms of the messages they received about well-being, faculty recognized the absence of explicit messages but acknowledged the existence of institutional structures that could support them if necessary (such as counseling services or professional societies). Finally, when comparing their experiences with those of current undergraduates, faculty identify issues with excessive technology, imposter syndrome, low extracurricular engagement, and low functionality among the elements against the newer generation's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper explores engineering experts' perceptions of the most important factors of thriving for undergraduate engineering students. Faculty, staff, and members of the engineering education system play a vital role in creating environments, and forming relationships with students conducive to thriving. The study in this paper builds upon prior work on engineering thriving that identified 147 factors developed from a literature review, refined with expert consultation. Out of the long list of factors, little is known regarding the most important factors that can serve as a starting point for engineering experts with limited resources to create environments and relationships that support more thriving engineering students. In this paper, we analyze ranked order data to investigate the most important internal thriving competencies. Participants include 47 engineering experts i.e., engineering administrators, professors, staff, and advisers. To find which competencies were perceived as most important to engineering thriving, each expert was asked to generate and define up to ten competencies that they considered to be most important, then rank these competencies in order of importance. During data analysis, ranked competencies were scored on a reverse ordinal points basis, with the most important rankings receiving 10 points and the least important rankings receiving 1 point. Overall, the top five most important competencies were Communication/Listening Skills (overall score = 104), Help-seeking/Resourcefulness (overall score = 104), Teamwork (overall score = 97), Time Management (overall score = 96), and Resilience (overall score = 95). Findings from this study highlight the importance of intrapersonal, social, and behavioral competencies, providing a starting point for future work developing a survey of thriving for engineering students. Furthermore, these findings provide a greater insight into which high-impact competencies engineering faculty, staff, and administrators can focus on when creating environments conducive to student thriving and interacting directly with students when teaching, supporting, advising, and mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an update of a Work-in-Progress presented at the ASEE 2021 virtual conference [1] and includes new data from after the 2021 paper was accepted for publication. An undergraduate research experience was developed in response to an Office of Naval Research program seeking to develop "innovative solutions that directly maintain, or cultivate a diverse, world-class STEM workforce in order to maintain the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps' technological superiority." During the fall 2020 semester, nine students were recruited to participate in a UAS cybersecurityfocused undergraduate research experience. Three faculty members each identified a small topic area for undergraduate students to pursue. The three areas are: 1. Small UAS (sUAS) Vulnerability and Threat Assessment and Mitigation 2. Effects of Cyber Attacks on Communication in UAS Swarms with Distributed Swarm Control 3. Enhancing Security of Cloud-Connected UAS Services. Students were placed onto teams based on their prior course experiences and the project requirements. Common resources were provided for all students to train them in conducting research. Teams were then tasked with developing a more comprehensive research plan for their specific project and carrying out that plan throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. A no-cost extension was granted to enable six students who had not graduated to continue into the Fall 2021 semester with the goals of completing their work and publishing the results in an academic outlet. Three students continued into the Spring 2022 semester finishing their publication work. Year 1 of the program was assessed by having students take a pre-, mid-, and post-survey and conducting a brief interview about their experiences. Students took a pre-survey at the start of the project and a mid-project survey shortly before the winter break. They completed the post survey and interview during the final week of the Spring semester in Year 1. Five students who remained with the project in Year 2 also completed a "final year" survey at the end of the Fall term in year 2. The surveys were a combination of project specific skills questions as well as relevant questions from the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA), an NSF funded assessment tool to measure student gains in research skills. This paper will describe the broader project, the individual student team projects and the outcomes of those projects, and results from the surveys and interviews. The purpose of this paper is to provide an example approach for future undergraduate research programs looking for practical approaches to implementing undergraduate research programs, particularly those in the cybersecurity area. [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]

This evidence-based paper will review the outcomes of a recently developed summer research program for undergraduate students. The Center of Transportation Research & Implementation (CTRI) at Minnesota State University, Mankato (MSUM) created a remote research program for Summer 2020. Along with others across the United States, MSUM went under COVID-19 lockdown for the unforeseen future during the Spring 2020 semester. The university cancelled access to most campus laboratories and brought a halt to all experimental research conducted in these facilities. Moreover, a significant number of undergraduate students lost their internships for Summer 2020. With these two substantial changes, CTRI created the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. CTRI contacted a donor who donated a funding for a single undergraduate research project (pre-COVID) and asked to make changes in the funding process to benefit multiple students. With the adaptation approved by the donor, the research center asked the faculty to submit proposals for undergraduate research projects that the researchers can conduct at their homes. The proposals requested projects to employ 1 - 4 undergraduate students with a limited, supplies-only budget (<$500). The supplies of the approved proposals were mailed to the students mid-May. The students worked on their projects throughout the summer at their homes with online guidance from their project advisor. In Summer 2020, five research projects that were related to transportation, utility, and energy infrastructure were funded. Each project had a unique theoretical background. An important selection criterion was the potential for the project to be expanded upon into a full undergraduate research project in the 2020-21 Academic Year and that may lead students presenting at the virtual National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2021. The initial findings of the project were presented to the research center via a Zoom conference call at the end of Summer 2020. Moreover, the groups that concluded their projects on time also presented in national platforms, including NCUR. The impact of the SURE program on undergraduate researchers were assessed via follow-up survey and meetings. This paper focusses on the impact of the SURE program on the students' technical ability, communication skills, educational experience, and future professional experiences. Additionally, the advisors provided positive feedback on their experience with the projects and undergraduate researchers. The initial success of the first SURE program caught the attention of the Undergraduate Research Center (URC) of the MSUM. URC adopted SURE as a permanent program and funds summer research projects, especially from disciplines that typically receive limited financial support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research is the process intended to create new or improved technology that can provide a competitive advantage at the business, industry, or national level. The future economic progress of any country will be driven by the invention and application of new technologies. The emphasis on funding in universities is misleading and understates the actual importance of research at the university and its importance in student formation. Successful research programs involve undergraduate students, graduate students, and informed faculty. Research prepares students to identify problems and solve them in innovative ways and can be measured by how students' knowledge, thinking patterns, skills and attitudes are changed. Involvement in research, for either students or faculty, addresses the need to develop curiosity and the ability to ask the right question. This paper will emphasize the importance of research to the economy and higher education. It will then introduce the importance of research to student formation and reinforce the importance of exposing students early to the concepts of research. This paper will then show the connection between research and Entrepreneurially Minded Learning (EML) and describe three projects, supported by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) and the Kern Foundation, intended to expose undergraduates to research early in their academic careers. The first project was part of KEEN's initial "EML through Research" workshop given in Nov 2019. The project, entitled "Research and EML: Helping Students (and Faculty) See and Understand the Value of Research" grew from a desire to involve more undergraduate students in research. The vision was to expose undergraduates to research and then determine how to teach them basic skills. While the scope of the project was limited, it led to the second project. The second project, entitled "Understanding the Importance of Research in Student Formation and Value Creation," was to develop three short videos intended to inform undergraduates about research. The three videos were filmed and associated instructor guides developed for topics concerning undergraduate research. The broad topics were "What is Research?", "Undergraduate Research," and "Product Commercialization." The third project is just beginning and aims to further expose undergraduates to research and reinforce the importance research in student formation. It is entitled "An EM-Driven Framework for Undergraduate Research" and involves six institutions from across the KEEN network. The areas being developed are Early Exposure, Student Research Training, Faculty & Mentor Training, and Assessment. This project is just starting and will be ongoing for three years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people continue to be significantly underrepresented and marginalized in engineering. Current reports indicate that approximately 26 percent of US adults have some form of disability. Yet only 6 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in engineering programs belong to this group. Several barriers have been identified that discourage and even prohibit people with disabilities from participating in engineering including arduous accommodations processes, lack of institutional support, and negative peer, staff, and faculty attitudes. These barriers are perpetuated and reinforced by a variety of ableist sociocultural norms and definitions that rely on popularized tropes and medicalized models that influence the ways this group experiences school to become engineers. In this paper, we seek to contribute to conversations that shape understanding of disability identity and the ways it is conceptualized in engineering programs. We revisit interview data from an ongoing grounded theory exploration of professional identity formation of undergraduate civil engineering students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Through our qualitative analysis, we identified overarching themes that contribute to understanding of how participants define and integrate disability identity to form professional identities and the ways they reshape and contribute to the civil engineering field through this lens. Emergent themes include experiencing/considering disability identity as a fluid experience, as a characteristic that 'sets you apart', and as a medicalized symptom or condition. Findings from this work can be used by engineering educators and administrators to inform more effective academic and personal support structures to destigmatize disability and promote the participation and inclusion of students and colleagues with disabilities in engineering and in our academic and professional communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing is an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site that offers unique summer undergraduate research experiences in the challenging field of sustainable manufacturing to national undergraduate students from two and four-year institutions. The objective of the REU Site is to introduce undergraduate students to the forefront of sustainable manufacturing research and to provide participants with the skills and pathways to pursue advanced degrees or careers in sustainable manufacturing. The intensive tenweek summer research and professional development experience hosts ten students per summer and addresses National Science Foundation priority areas such as advanced manufacturing and sustainability. Undergraduate research projects in the REU site address manufacturing process, manufacturing system, and fundamental sustainable manufacturing principles within continuous (e.g. chemical manufacturing) and discrete (e.g. automotive manufacturing) manufacturing systems. Projects are further associated with topics that cross cut the aforementioned thrust areas such as, emerging and environmentally benign materials manufacturing, sustainable process design and control, and life-cycle engineering and value recovery. Traditionally, this REU Site hosts in-person undergraduate researchers to undertake their research projects in a faculty mentor laboratory during the program. However, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that the REU Site program be held virtually during the summer of 2021. This poster and summary paper detail the steps taken to transition REU Site program activities to a virtual environment and postprogram evaluation results of participant experiences. Evaluation results of the virtual program are compared to evaluation results of prior in-person Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the culmination of four years of an NSF-funded project implementing and assessing an undergraduate additive manufacturing course at three large state universities: Texas Tech University, Kansas State University, and California State University - Northridge. The research questions addressed are: (1) What are the changes in skill and knowledge concerning additive manufacturing experienced by undergraduate students? (2) What is the effect of this course on attitudes towards engineering and self-efficacy in engineering for enrolled undergraduate students? The sample consists of four years of data from the undergraduate students enrolled in the course at all three universities (combined N = 196). Our method for data collection was matched-pair surveys that contained both (i) an assessment for content knowledge and (ii) an attitudinal assessment previously validated in published research for data collection about attitudes towards engineering. Matched-pair surveys means that we collected data from Student X at Time 1 (before being taught) and then again from at Time 2 (after being taught) and are able to directly compare any change in content knowledge or attitude within the same person. We also collected demographic information to be able to see whether changes in, for example, women differed from those in men. All undergraduates experienced statistically significant increases in content knowledge and additive manufacturing skills. In an intriguing finding, female students outperformed male students, which fits with the research that indicates that engineering courses which emphasize pragmatic and real-world applications, as well as those that use group work, will disproportionately help underserved engineering populations like women and people of color succeed. Fitting with the above finding, undergraduates noted that they perceived that they had increased in teamwork, communication, and computer programming skills. These gains were particularly high in female students and students of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During times of local and national quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had to close campuses and expediently convert operations and services from face-to-face to virtual learning environments, including virtual classrooms, learning communities, offices, and meeting/advising rooms. Many engineering faculty and students experienced personal, technical, and psychosocial challenges associated with this dramatically altered reality, which may have significant and unprecedented effects on their personal and academic lives. The current study presents results from a needs assessment survey examining the perceptions of 157 engineering students majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering about the strengths and challenges exhibited by their professors/instructors as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, we describe the instructional efforts and approaches taken by faculty to resolve the practical challenges because of the pandemic. Student perceptions of faculty effectiveness and support were examined by analyzing means and frequencies of survey items. Results revealed that on average, engineering students were positive in their perceptions of the effectiveness and resources/support provided by their professors/instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative data from an open-ended question where coded and quantified. The theme that emerged most frequently reflected engineering students' need for professors/instructors to demonstrate flexibility/leniency with assignments, quizzes, exams, and deadlines. This short paper provides critical assessment of the gaps in institutional services and resources and provide the required feedback, while informing the institution and the research community about the ways to develop a resilient support network for engineering students in the times of crisis. Future work will consider how student responses change under the altering societal and work/academic conditions with or without COVID-19 pandemic being present at that time. Results from the current study also provide recommendations for effective online instruction in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This National Science Foundation (NSF) project focuses on creating an immersive international summer research experience for students enrolled in a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI). Over the course of a three-year grant period, this research seeks to: (1) train and mentor 18 diverse undergraduate students from PUIs in Southern California in bioinformatics research in a collaborative and international setting; (2) disseminate the research outcomes at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals; (3) encourage and prepare undergraduate students from PUIs for enrollment in graduate programs in bioinformatics, bioengineering, or related fields; (4) foster existing collaborations and develop new research collaborations between the PI at the University of San Diego (USD) and scientists at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden; and (5) develop a diverse cohort of globally engaged scientists/engineers that seek career opportunities and collaborators throughout the world. This paper reports on the first year of the grant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost every career encompasses some form of security and today's students must be introduced to various aspects of security to be effective in their career and daily lives. South Carolina State University (SC State University) has an ongoing Target Infusion Proposal grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) to address the problem of the lack of awareness and participation in cyber security since 2019. The project vision is to create a successful model of institution wide reform for undergraduate cybersecurity education at SC State University using instruction, internships, and seminars. The student should be able to evaluate, make decisions, and take responsible actions in the context of cyber security. This project uses a multi-tier approach to increase capacity in cyber security education, training, and awareness in the undergraduate curriculum The objective of this poster presentation is to share our experiences with various project activities. The findings presented in this paper may be used by interested parties involved in STEM curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software architecture students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability to use their knowledge to design software architectures. This paper investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. We developed a questionnaire with open-ended questions to assess the self-confidence levels and related factors, which was taken by one-hundred ten students in two semesters. The students answers were coded and analyzed afterward. We found that self-confidence is weakly associated with the students' critical thinking and independent from their cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and expectations from the course. The results suggest that to improve the self-confidence of the students, the instructors should work on improving the students' critical thinking capabilities. [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]

Involving undergraduate students in engineering research provides an opportunity and an avenue to gain in-depth and hands-on experiential learning with topics related to their major. Students involved learn about contributions to the field they study through research and understand the value of meaningful contributions, specifically experimentation and hardware development. Working with a research advisor provides students with mentoring, teamwork, and interaction with peers and graduate students. Research experience for undergraduate students provides a unique opportunity for faculty members and research advisors to guide them and help them explore career opportunities. This paper describes the design and development of a Data Acquisition System for a Hybrid and Liquid Rocket Test Stand. Data Acquisition is an important part to the development and design of an effective and functional rocket engine. Parameters such as thrust, pressure, temperature, and mass flow rate are important to see how the engine performs during rocket engine combustion. Along with the piping and containment systems designed to keep that combustion within reasonable boundaries. Some of the factors that increase the difficulty of data acquisition include high temperatures, high pressures, number of sensors, complex machinery, and the need for high sampling rates due to the rate at which the stability of combustion phenomena changes. Implementing a robust data acquisition system would greatly increase the ability to perform rigorous ground tests of hybrid and liquid motors. It would help to obtain real time analysis and feedback on the performance of the engine tested and would additionally help to identify and mitigate potential problems and risks that may occur. To this end, a High-Speed Data Acquisition system is being developed to serve the demands of such a system for the Rocket Propulsion Lab (RPL) at the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is verified that undergraduate students learn through research. A short project was designed and performed to assist the understanding of interdisciplinary ethics, political, environmental, economic, and other disciplines in civil and construction engineering projects. It was part of a larger structural design project. The project was a simulation of real-life multidisciplinary aspects of engineering projects. Various ways were tested and developed. Individual and group projects were assigned. An activity of theatrical role presentation was added to the previous methods that included a critical thinking debate. After an initial literature review, they were asked to play their role after the instructor introduced their role in the project. The instructor guided the students in gathering information about their enrolled position during the term. The role positions were in construction or the disciplines participating in the construction. At the end of the term, they presented their research as their role and then discussed and argued it in a town hall with their classmates. Each student explained, debated, and defended their point of view based on their research. They were suggested to manage the situation, find reasonable solutions that other parties might agree to, be ethical and rational, and follow the regulations and legislations even if the discussion results did not match their personal or group role benefits. Each of the students presented their role section even if it was assigned as a team project. Despite the point that all the students participated in the team presentation, their involvement and participation were assessed based on their peers' feedback and the instructor's assessment. The students showed particular interest, enthusiasm, and passion for the project, and the observation of their commitment and involvement was exceptional. This paper presents the project and the reasons for the success of this experience. The pieces of the discussion and arguments of the students are presented. This method and the students' response and feedback conclude that the approach can be adopted and used in courses in different disciplines with higher education learning environments that match the current complicated job conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is a rising concern for organizations hiring undergraduates out of college in computing disciplines. This is reflected in the emerging prominence of cybersecurity related courses, certificates, and degree programs, and reflected in the most recent curricular standards guidelines. Perspectives on security recognize it as both a system discipline, meaning the inclusion of hardware, software, and networking components, and a cross-cutting skill across the major phases on the software engineering lifecycle (requirements, design, verification & validation, construction, and evolution and maintenance). Our conjecture is that there are many open and available resources for the first perspective (system) but few for the second perspective (software engineering). In this paper we share experiences creating a new junior-level security course in secure software engineering as a required course in an undergraduate accredited software engineering degree program. Specifically, and aligned with the latter perspective, we share the challenges we faced when seeking curricular resources, including open courseware repositories and textbooks, to jumpstart the development. We reflect on these experiences by providing a map of curricular resources to cross-cutting software engineering lifecycle phases, examining popular open (and usually federally funded) courseware repositories including the SEED project from Syracuse University and the Cybersecurity Labs and Resource Knowledge-base (CLARK) initiative, as well as ad hoc resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper covers the important aspects of new research methodologies, including the methods and tools, for undergraduate students at a Civil Engineering program. It aims to improve the research competencies of civil engineering students through immersing the students in different types of research exercises. The activities have been exploratory, experimental and theoretical. The focus of the new approach is on developing soft skills, gaining practical and hands-on skills, research management and planning, and presenting the results in an optimum manner. Six undergraduate students from two departments were involved in various components of a research project related to the post-tensioned concrete structures. The core project started in a company specialized in post-tensioning industry. Initially, the learning objective was to gain a deep understanding of the mechanical properties of concrete and steel as well as the post-tensioning of the concrete slabs. However, the main objective was to get students involved in designing effective test platforms from scratch, to perform experiments with concrete blocks and a special compressible material used in industry. One of the goals was to investigate the friction coefficient of connection between the concrete slab and walls in Post-Tensioned construction. The research involved testing the resistance of concrete blocks against applied loads in variety of conditions. Furthermore, students were to explore the behavior of a compressible material that is used to wrap rebar, as a release detail, for slab and walls in Post-Tensioning construction. The goals were achieved by establishing a unique testing rig to apply lateral load to the poured concrete specimens that contained the foamwrapped steel dowel (rebar), which extended into a poured concrete slab. Consequent research projects have been conducted to construct a model of concrete-foam-rebar media and simulate it using the Finite Element Analysis with ABAQUS© package. The objective has been to refine the model and material characteristics, until a nonlinear analysis and simulation produces valid and comparable results to the laboratory prototype. Structured and neat research methods were tabulated to teach the students as how to conduct research in a more passionate, productive, and useful way. These were conducting the extensive literature review, establishing the complex test rigs, evaluating the sophisticated mesh configurations and performing non-linear analysis. The most important outcomes of the new research methods were; students' eagerness and enthusiasm to establish the test platforms, learning all the necessary hands-on skills despite obstacles and limitations, learning new simulation packages, and presenting in various conferences and symposiums in a professional way. The reflections provided by students demonstrated their extraordinary satisfaction of this life-long learning experience, and the importance of their gained skills in future graduate programs and/or high-level industry positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finite element analysis (FEA) is a powerful tool that allows engineers to evaluate how well a structure can withstand a given loading environment. While commercial FEA software has a wide range of capacities, it requires substantial insight and a minimum requisite skillset in undergraduate mechanics to generate meaningful results. The purpose of an undergraduate finite element course is to build such insight within the minds of students. This is typically done utilizing both theory and practical application via commercial FEA software. Unfortunately, both the "user-friendliness" and generality of commercial software may make it more difficult for students to understand its inner workings (e.g., how geometrically assigned constraints are translated to nodal constraints). The work presented in this paper attempts to address this issue by having students contribute to their own 2D FEA code. This allows the student to see how concepts, such as 2D element quality checks, are integrated as each is brought in as an additional subroutine to the code. Also, writing one's own code allows one to showcase more easily where exactly simplified element formulations recover exact solutions from strength of materials, as well as idealized problems that unambiguously demonstrate how FEA is not always conservative as a design tool. MATLAB Grader is used to facilitate the coding process for students by allowing instructorguided scaffolding of the code, providing instantaneous formative feedback, and ensuring that their code runs as expected. The 2D FEA code could then be used for simple problems involving 1D beam and 2D plane stress elements with the intention of demonstrating practical aspects of FEA. This includes model development concepts such as the appropriate connectivity between different element types. It also addresses results interpretation, such as problems wherein analytical solutions used to validate FEA solutions are nearly always expressed in terms of specific stress components and not in terms of effective, e.g., Von Mises, quantities. The results from the 2D FEA code may also be compared with results from a commercial FEA program such as ANSYS Workbench to help the students directly see the integration of FEA theory in practice. A cursory assessment of the effectiveness of this process has been measured via a Qualtrics survey distributed towards the end of the term. The survey intends to gather the students' subjective experience regarding MATLAB Grader and the development and use of the 2D FEA code. Survey results are separated from any student identifiers and are not tied to student performance in the course. The authors intend to pursue a more rigorous assessment regarding the effect of this process on students' conceptual understanding in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the adverse impacts of harassment on career outcomes of women and racial minorities in academic engineering has been increasingly recognized. The way individuals define harassment has important implications for designing prevention programs and the ability of the engineering community to recognize and address this issue. This paper explores how undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty and staff in engineering define harassment in response to open-ended questions. The study is based on semi-structured individual interviews from 102 participants at two research universities in the United States. To build a comprehensive understanding of harassment, content analysis was used to identify themes in participants' responses. We also explored whether and how participants associate harassment with their own identity (e.g., gender, race). Participants recognized three overarching types of harassment: sexual (e.g., unwanted sexual attention), identity-based (e.g., race, gender), and general (i.e., neither sexual nor identity-based). Participants revealed a spectrum of behavioral indicators, including offensive language (e.g., comments, jokes), discrimination, and disrespectful behaviors. Whereas women and men perceived similar behaviors as indicators of harassment, the types of harassment were somewhat related to their social identity and status at the university (e.g., student, faculty). The implications of the findings for future research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel project-oriented system on chip (SoC) design course. The course is taught in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at the University of Texas at Arlington and is offered as CSE 4356 System on Chip Design for computer engineering undergraduates, as CSE 5356 for computer engineering graduate students, and as EE 5315 for electrical engineering graduate students. It is taught as one course combining all numbers. All students are given the same lectures, course materials, assignments, and projects. Grading standards and expectations are the same for all students as well. The course in its current form was first offered in fall 2020 and was taught online due to COVID-19 restrictions. The course was offered again in fall 2021 in a traditional on-campus, in-person mode of delivery. Two seasoned educators, with more than eighty years of total teaching experience, combined to team teach the course. One also brought more than thirty years of industrial design experience to the course. SoC FPGA devices have been available for use by designers for more than 10 years and are widely used in applications that require both an embedded microcomputer and FPGA-based logic for real-time computationally-intense solutions. Such solutions require skills in C programming, HDL programming, bus topologies forming the bridge between FPGA fabric and the microprocessor space, Linux operating systems and virtualization, and kernel device driver development. The breadth of the skills that were conveyed to students necessitated a team teaching approach to leverage the diverse background of the instructors. With such a wide range of topics, one of the biggest challenges was developing a course that was approachable for a greatly varied population of students - a mix of Computer Engineering (CpE) and Electrical Engineering (EE) students at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Another, perhaps less obvious, challenge was the inherently application focus of the course, which presents challenges to many graduate students whose undergraduate degree lacked a robust hands-on design experience. Selection of an appropriate project was key to making the course effective and providing a fun learning experience for students. The projects were aligned to relevant industry applications, stressing complex modern intellectual property (IP) work flows, while still being approachable to students. The design of a universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) IP module in 2020 and a serial peripheral interface (SPI) IP module in 2021 were chosen as the projects for the first two offerings of the course. The Terasic/Intel DE1-SoC development board and Intel Quartus Prime 18.1 design software were the technologies chosen for the course. The development board and basic test instruments were provided to each student in a take-home lab kit. The system on chip design course has proven to be a popular but challenging course for our undergraduate and graduate students in computer engineering and electrical engineering. The course has demonstrated that it is possible to successfully teach an advanced design-oriented course to students of varying majors, levels, educational backgrounds, and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing support to undergraduate students pursuing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degrees is important for student retention. In recognition of this importance, academic institutions allocate substantial resources to provide such support inside and outside of class. Support can take on a range of different forms and, in thinking holistically about all support mechanisms, colleges are often faced with the challenge of identifying the efficacy of its investments in student support. This scenario led Lee and Matusovich [1] to develop the model of co-curricular support (MCCS), which is based on Tinto's model of institutional departure, that identified institutional practices that offer support for undergraduate students in engineering. Additionally, this model can help explain the impact of students' interaction with social, academic, and professional systems on students' success. In this paper, we use survey data collected electronically in spring 2019 from about 900 undergraduate students at nine colleges and public universities to relate the extent to which students engage in specific activities with their perceptions of support along three of the MCCSinformed factors: STEM peer connections, academic peer support, out-of-class engagement. Using structural equation modeling, this analysis advances our understanding in a few key areas. First, it links behavioral variables (i.e., level of engagement) with the MCCS-informed perceptions of support, which had not been done previously. Investigating these relationships builds further evidence of validity of a newly developed instrument that operationalizes the MCCS. Second, the analysis points to specific support efforts that colleges may invest in or advise students to participate in that appear to strongly relate to students' perceptions of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This "Innovation in Engineering Teaching Practices" paper focuses on the development of a course module for an undergraduate introductory circuits course that highlights sustainability and life cycles of electric vehicle (EV) batteries. The EV battery module leverages circuits course concepts, introduces students to sociotechnical material, and emphasizes the circular economy in electrical engineering. We identify learning objectives for the module, provide pre-class activities and in-class teaching activities for circuits instructors, including discussion prompts and practice problems. We also offer samples of post-class assessments, including reflection and computation questions for homework and exams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In STEM education there can often be a greater emphasis on technical aspects of design and development in comparison to potential social impacts. Yet, it is becoming increasingly urgent to approach design with a socio-technical perspective. Updating STEM education to integrate deep consideration of social factors with technical content, however, remains a significant challenge. This paper presents an approach to capstone course design that explores how Human-Centered Design (HCD) mindsets and practices can be foregrounded in a heavily technology-centric learning experience. We developed a capstone course for undergraduate STEM students that foregrounds human-centered mindsets in a technical project focused on 3D printing prosthetic devices for a participant with a limb difference. We analyzed data collected from the course to shed light on specific challenges in foregrounding a deep human-centered perspective in technical STEM courses, and we provide guidance for educators who also seek a similar reorientation. Our analysis consisted of a thematic coding on written deliverables and instructor observations from the course, using a set of HCD-aligned values and a set of tech-centric values as codes. Our findings suggest that understanding how to de-center one's own goals and center the goals of a participant are reasonable learning objectives for students, that educators should create space for students to articulate and unpack prior expectations, that starting with technical aspects before considering social aspects in learning can make it harder to adopt an HCD-aligned approach, and educators should give repeated opportunities for engagement with HCD topics since the material takes time to digest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary goal of the undergraduate engineering curriculum is to lay the groundwork for the remainder of the students' educational training, as well as prepare them for work in the engineering industry. Traditionally, the curriculum primarily consists of lecture-based courses, with some hands-on work, mostly through demonstration. In recent years, the curriculum has started using more project-based courses. In these updated courses, the theory covered via lecture is merged with hands-on project work. This integrated approach is designed to not only give the students a foundation of the course theory, but to expand on that and give them practical, handson applications of that theory. Additionally, it gives the opportunity to learn skills in design, manufacturing, electronics, controls, and prototyping. This study looks at a mechanics of materials course project that has the students build a tensiletesting device from course-supplied kit to evaluate mechanical properties of a chosen material. Traditionally, this course was mainly taught using a problem-based pedagogy with the addition of a few basic labs and one project in the last few weeks of the course. The project detailed in this paper is an updated version of projects used in previous iterations of this experimental course. Despite the changes, all of these projects share a commonality of requiring the students to combine knowledge from multiple engineering disciplines, including circuits, controls, and mechanics of materials. The effect of this experimental course on the students was analyzed a pre- and post-course selfefficacy survey that looks at how the students' self-perception of their engineering abilities and skills were affected by the application of the project-based course. To study the change in students' self-efficacy, the following hypothesis has been derived: Hypothesis: Students who participate in the experimental project will demonstrate an increased engineering self-efficacy when compared to the onset of the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquiring competency in nanotechnology requires understanding of phenomena that are inaccessible to the everyday macro-world experience of the student. Significant capital requirements for nanoengineering laboratory equipment and small student cohort sizes limit student opportunities for hands-on learning. These factors may present barriers to entry for introductory students to pursue a career in nanotechnology. Haptics and interactive visualization afford students the opportunity to gain intuition through active learning and engaging different senses; however, commercial haptics setups are often prohibitively expensive for the average lab. We explore the feasibility of teaching non-intuitive nanotechnology concepts by designing, developing, implementing, and assessing a low-cost haptics and visualization activity for the teaching of the force-distance curve concept and its connection to the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). Forces and length scales relevant to AFM measurements are well below what we experience in our everyday lives, making the study and understanding of this topic difficult for students to intuitively understand. The haptic feedback controller and accompanying computer application enable students to "feel and see" the forces an AFM tip experiences as it approaches the surface of a measured sample. This instructional activity has now been implemented in an undergraduate-level class ("Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory") at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which mechanical engineering students obtain their first experience with nanotechnology. Students were split into two groups for instruction and assessment; students in Group 1 (N=7) received traditional lab instruction and students in Group 2 (N=4) received the same activity with haptic and visualization as a medium for relaying information. Post-instruction assessment reveals promising learning outcomes. Group 1 students scored an average of 55% and Group 2 students scored an average of 96%. The software is scalable, and the developed controller costs ~$150 -- as opposed to thousands of dollars for a traditional haptics controller -- making the activity feasible for a range of teaching labs. The work presented in this paper suggests that haptics and visualization can serve as useful tools to teach challenging nanotechnology concepts, thereby making the field accessible and attractive to a broader range of students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning Assistants (LAs) are undergraduate students that serve as course assistants in STEM courses to facilitate the learning of their near-peers. This paper explored the perspectives of LAs at four institutions with respect to mentoring and their personal outcomes. Interviews with program coordinators revealed different goals and implementation of the LA programs at each institution. Survey responses from the LAs revealed differences by school in the percentage who felt that they had been mentored as well as how the LA's perceived that they had mentored others. The most common outcomes from serving as an LA were teaching skills, communication skills, confidence, and satisfaction from giving back. Statistically significant correlations were found between some mentoring attributes and outcomes, such as perceiving that their mentoring included listening was correlated with the outcomes of satisfaction from giving back (phi 0.323) and communication skills (phi 0.134). The results may be impacted by COVID-related online instruction. This preliminary study is laying the groundwork for a larger study to examine the ties between different LA program characteristics and the outcomes for LAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores formative experiences and various aspects of one female undergraduate student's Kayla's time in university, from her first to last year of school. Studies have shown that normative engineering culture can make women feel "visible as a woman, yet invisible as engineers" [1]. Some women who persist in the field of engineering have been shown to have an "engineering identity" [2]. This study focuses on how various aspects of one student's lived experiences formed her engineering identity and assisted in her ability to feel authentic in the field of engineering. The work presented in this paper examined Kayla's experiences with multiple internships, the importance of peer relationships, and the role of extracurricular activities in identity development. The concept of in/authenticity by Faulkner [3] and the engineering identity framework by Godwin & Lee [2] were used to explore her experiences. This autoethnographic account used a co-constructed approach [4] between the student Kayla and her mentor Gretchen and followed autoethnographic steps outlined by Chang [5]. This work demonstrated how various aspects of a female undergraduate student's experiences, including internships, involvement on campus, and peer relationships, can build an engineering identity and create a feeling of authenticity in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theory paper focuses on understanding how mastery learning has been implemented in undergraduate engineering courses through a systematic literature review. Academic environments that encourage learning, mastery, and continuous improvement rather than inherent ability can promote performance and persistence. Scholarship has argued that students could achieve mastery of the course material when the time available to master concepts and the quality of instruction was made appropriate to each learner. Increasing time to demonstrate mastery involves a course structure that allows for repeated attempts on learning assessments (i.e., homework, quizzes, projects, exams). Students are not penalized for failed attempts but are rewarded for achieving eventual mastery. The mastery learning approach recognizes that mastery is not always achieved on first attempts and learning from mistakes and persisting is fundamental to how we learn. This singular concept has potentially the greatest impact on students' mindset in terms of their belief they can be successful in learning the course material. A significant amount of attention has been given to mastery learning courses in secondary education and mastery learning has shown an exceptionally positive effect on student achievement. However, implementing mastery learning in an undergraduate course can be a cumbersome process as it requires instructors to significantly restructure their assignments and exams, evaluation process, and grading practices. In light of these challenges, it is unclear the extent to which mastery learning has been implemented in undergraduate engineering courses or if similar positive effects can be found. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review to elucidate, how in the U.S., (1) has mastery learning been implemented in undergraduate engineering courses from 1990 to 2021 and (2) the student outcomes that have been reported for these implementations. Using the systematic process outlined by Borrego et al. (2014), we surveyed seven databases and a total of 584 articles consisting of engineering and non-engineering courses were identified. We focused our review on studies that were centered on applying the mastery learning pedagogical method in undergraduate engineering courses. All peer-reviewed and practitioner articles and conference proceedings that were within our scope were included in the synthetization phase of the review. Twelve studies focused on applying mastery learning to undergraduate engineering courses. The mastery learning method was mainly applied on midterm exams, few studies used the method on homework assignments, and no study applied the method to the final exam. Students reported an increase in learning as a result of applying mastery learning. Several studies reported that students' grades in a traditional final exam were not affected by mastery learning. Students' self-reported evaluation of the course suggests that students prefer the mastery learning approach over traditional methods. Although a clear consensus on the effect of the mastery learning approach could not be achieved as each article applied different survey instruments to capture students' perspectives. Responses to open-ended questions have mixed results. Two studies report more positive student comments on opened-ended questions, while one study reports receiving more negative comments regarding the implementation of the mastery learning method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postindustrial societies are characterized by complex technological objects and systems. The publics therein are increasingly reliant on engineers to take public welfare into account when designing and maintaining these objects and systems and raise awareness when public welfare is threatened. The training engineers receive in their engineering undergraduate education is thus expected to foster their sense of responsibility to public welfare, but such training may be absent or insufficient. In this paper, we draw on a survey of 120 employed engineers in the US to assess the extent to which they received formal public responsibility training in their undergraduate education and to assess the relationships between this training and their response to one of four randomly assigned ethical dilemmas. We find that engineers who reported receiving training in public welfare responsibilities as undergraduate students felt better prepared to address public welfare issues than those who had not received such training. Individuals with training in public welfare responsibilities were less likely to identify the ethical dilemma as irrelevant to their work, indicate that such dilemmas happen all the time, be uncomfortable reporting the issue, and believe that their colleagues might respect them less if they report. These findings have implications for improving engineering ethics education and ethical conduct trainings within engineering practice more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Work-in-Progress Paper describes the collaborative efforts initiated by our University's Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) and some of the important milestones of its First-Year Scholars Program (FYSP). The program pairs interested first-year students (FYS) with research faculty mentors who guide them through a year-long research project, with training in research and research methods in the field. Faculty present their research projects to students for review. Then students are encouraged to apply for projects that they find interesting, regardless of whether the projects are in their majors. The OUR then pairs students with faculty to participate in the program. Participating students receive a stipend for their work ($1,000 in the Fall and $1,000 in the Spring), and faculty receive funding to support their research projects. Our university is currently in Year 3 of this program, which has grown exponentially each year (13 students in Year 1, 71 students in Year 2, and 141 students in Year 3). This growth has been specifically impressive in the Engineering & Engineering Technology (E&ET) disciplines, with 1 project in Year 1, 21 projects in Year 2, and 22 projects in Year 3, representing the most of any college at ---. As administrators and faculty in higher education, we understand the importance that overall student success plays in students' academic effectiveness. To guide these students towards achieving that success requires intentional efforts and programs by the entire institution to tutor new students about 'how to be effective and successful.' So, the E&ET Category Research Themes include: (1) Project-Based exercises; (2) Design Process Instructions; (3) Problem-Based Open-Ended Creative Work; (4) Teamwork insights development; (5) Diversity-Tone: Female & Minority student components; (6) K-12 E&ET Pipeline Participation encouragement; (7) Development of Institutional Review Board (IRB) Documentation; and (8) Learning Technologies. Kennesaw State University is recognized in promoting diversity and inclusive climate and has been placed 3rd in African American enrollment within a college of engineering, 24th in the nation in bachelor's degrees presented to African Americans in all disciplines, 83rd in the nation in conferring bachelor's degrees to all minorities across all disciplines. Degrees to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native-American are measured in the Diverse study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teamwork has been identified as one of the essential professional skills for the 21st century. Business, industries, and corporates require their employees to work in teams on various projects. Therefore, it is crucial to introduce and train undergraduate students on teamwork skills. Working in teams is not easy as one needs to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and opinions. The disagreement among the team members may lead to conflict and chaos that jeopardizes the team's harmony. Therefore, just creating teams and assigning a group project is insufficient to help undergraduate students develop teamwork skills. Instructors need to help students become cognizant of their teamwork skills, such as conflict resolution, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. In this research paper, we intend to understand the perception of students enrolled in a sophomore-level system's course regarding conflict resolution skills, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. We also want to understand how the perception of these values is related to one another. In the light of this study, we want to answer the following research questions (1) How do students' reported conflict management skills relate to their reported scrum values? (2) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their conflict management skills? (3) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their reported scrum values?. A course on system analysis and design followed a project-based cooperative learning approach. The students were required to work in teams and complete the course deliverables, including the final course project. The team projects followed a scrum approach that helped students identify the project requirements, perform modeling and develop a prototype. Since students worked on scrumdriven projects in a cooperative learning environment, the students were required to participate in a survey study that allowed the instructional team to develop an understanding of the students' perception of conflict management, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. The responses of the students were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results suggest that students were competent in managing conflict, adhering to scrum values, and demonstrating a high-level cultural self-awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our objective in this Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) paper is to describe an innovative approach and the impact of that approach on undergraduates engaged in engineering and computer science research experience involving robotics swarms. While critiques of a narrow reading of EBP approaches rightly assert inapplicability when applied as a mandate to educational practitioners [1], our goal here is to contribute to the evidence base supporting our educational practitionerdriven pedagogy thereby expanding the definition and applicability of EBP in education. More recent approaches to EBP in disciplines aligned with the learning sciences have made it clear that a broad range of evidentiary warrant (i.e., beyond quantitative measures in randomized control trials), integration of cognitive learning theory with human developmental theory, and both practitioner and learner input are critical to developing an evidence base appropriate to guide educational practice [2], [3]. We seek to help undergraduate students develop into independent researchers through challenging them with real-world problems utilizing human-swarm interactions as both research context and pedagogical model for how to engage students in undergraduate research. We describe our program and the sequential mixed methods evaluation informing quality improvement and summative evidence of impact on participants. Our undergraduate researchers explore innovative ways of interacting with collectively emergent systems behavior without directly controlling individual building blocks of swarms, and we utilize our understanding of human-swarm interaction as a model for organizing their research experience. Students gain first-hand knowledge of the nonlinearity and robustness of robot swarm behaviors through observations and interactions during hands-on experiments. We give students ownership of engineering problems formulated as challenges their "swarm" must solve. With this active learning approach, students' creativities are stimulated, and they become more confident, comfortable, and competent in solving complex robotics problems [4], [5]. We utilized a sequential mixed methods evaluation design for triangulation, complementarity, and development [6], [7]. This allowed us to leverage analysis of collected data to inform development of later data sources (i.e., development), as well as to examine the degree of overlap (i.e., triangulation) and independent contribution (i.e., complementarity) across quantitative and qualitative data sources. Data sources included a pre-post survey and focus groups during week 4 and week 8 of our 10-week program. These data sources allowed quantitative pre-post change analysis to be triangulated with participant self-assessment of impact and complemented with participant description of activities and perspectives that facilitated such impact as well as suggestions for improvement. Participants described positive impacts of the autonomy-supportive structure and authentic nature of the program in all areas and most strongly in Research Skills development. Participant recommendations centered on better communication, increased direct support from mentors, and focus on leadership, careers/graduate school, and scientist identity development. We recommend consideration of literature on cognitive apprenticeship in communities of practice organized around research groups [8] to inform projects such as this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the theory, practical construction, and experiments of a plasma antenna to radiate VHF wireless signals. The results show that a plasma antenna can be an effective radiator of RF signals with characteristics that favorably compare with a comparable metal antenna. Furthermore, when de-energized, the plasma antenna effectively disappears and thus can be useful when an object equipped with this antenna requires stealth (i.e., undetectable to RADAR). This paper provides a gentle introduction to plasma antennas for undergraduate physics and electrical engineering students who are studying general electromagnetic theory and basic antenna design. Building, measuring and characterizing a plasma antenna will enable experiential learning of not only the plasma antennas, but will also enhance the students' knowledge of electrical conductivity, dielectric breakdown and quantum mechanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advances have significantly reduced lead times in product design. One such advancement is topology optimization (TO) which generates optimal designs to meet specific product specifications. TO is rapidly being adopted by the industry as many commercial computeraided-design (CAD) platforms now provide in-built modules for TO. This necessitates training of engineering workforce. In this paper, we discuss the results of a study carried out to quantify the impact of introducing TO to junior undergraduate mechanical engineering students. In this study, students were asked to minimize the weight of a structure by removing material, through trial-and-error, while constantly verifying its performance using finite element analysis (FEA). The students were then asked to optimize the same structure, this time using topology optimization. Results from both approaches were compared for lead time and performance. The trial-and-error approach was significantly worse both in lead time, and design performance, compared to the TO-driven approach. Finally, a course project that involved minimizing the weight of a complex structural component was assigned. Students were able to generate unique designs based on different simulation parameters and constraints chosen during TO. Thus, a state-of-art design tool was gradually introduced to underclassmen, through lecture, lab exercises and course projects. This study shows that TO can indeed be deployed in a class-room setting to help better prepare the students as they enter the workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]