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The spread of COVID-19 has significantly disrupted the educational landscape since March 2020.Instructors at higher education institutions had to quickly transition to an online environment for remote delivery of their academic programs. Even though academic programs are relatively easy to adapt for remote delivery as compared to other industries, educators were still tasked with redesigning their courses to guarantee the quality of education delivered to their students. This challenge is particularly true with engineering entrepreneurship educators since their course structures heavily focus on developing intangibles such as an entrepreneurial mindset and team collaboration through immersion into hands-on learning experiences. To create this experiential learning environment, engineering entrepreneurship educators have, in general, relied uponface-to-face interactions with students. Little has been published in the existing literature to report the challenges, strategies, and innovations that can help transition effectively and deliver such academic programs remotely. In this paper, the authors from four major Canadian higher education institutions report our experience from ‘trial-byfire’ mode to redesign and deliver various courses for remote learning. This paper is by no means presenting validated “best practices” but aims to trigger discussions surrounding tools available to educators considering such a transition. We hope that this paper will provide insights and strategies for our colleagues to employ in their future course design and delivery. We also hope to invite a conversation to learn more about our colleagues’ experiences and explore opportunities to identify and validate approaches for effectively teaching engineering entrepreneurship in a remote learning environment.

With the rise of an innovation-based, technology-centric economy over the past two decades, there has been a shift in the market, enabling technological entrepreneurs to build business ventures that have realized accelerated growth and reached considerable scale. This “new economy” has created a need for individuals with a balanced skill set accompanying both business acumen, and technological innovation of complex systems. In esponse to this need, post-secondary engineering education institutions are teaching more business and entrepreneurship content. In Canada, most of the major post-secondary engineering education institutions offer some form of entrepreneurial education. However, approaches and programs offered by respective institutions vary in their approach to teaching engineering entrepreneurship, yielding a variety of different program implementations. There is, thus, a strong need to develop a Community of Practice focusing on engineering entrepreneurship education in Canada to foster a more rigorous and collaborative effort to evolve entrepreneurial teaching and learning. This paper is a first attempt to document and interpret the current state of a select number of Canadian Engineering Entrepreneurship Education programs. The founding members of the Canadian Engineering Education Association’s (CEEA) Engineering Entrepreneurship and technology innovation (EETI) Special Interest Group (SIG) have collaboratively collected information regarding the current practice of Engineering Entrepreneurship education within their affiliated institutions. This paper examines the Institutional Context, Strategy, Business Infrastructure, as well as the programs employed for Teaching and Learning at both the Undergraduate and Graduate levels. Our goal is to present a snapshot of the current practice for which entrepreneurship education is delivered at the institutions for which the founding members of the EETI SIG reside, as well as, discuss how entrepreneurship intersects with the other areas of engineering education, for example, design, the maker space movement, and professionalism, as well as, many of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board’s twelve graduate attributes.

To be a competitive supply of renewable energy, the power capture performance of ocean wave energy converters must improve. This requires that wave energy converter designers identify and invest resources to develop devices that exhibit a strong Technology Performance Level early in the development process. We contend that completing this identification process at the conceptual design stage requires a generalized method to establish the power capture upper bound for any given wave energy converter architecture. This upper bound must reflect simultaneous implementation of both optimal geometry control and power take-off force control – components known to be essential to optimizing performance but difficult to envision for complex WEC architectures. In this work, we develop and demonstrate a procedure, built on the mechanical circuit framework, to identify this upper bound for a self-reacting point absorber with an inertial modulation mechanism performing the geometry control. We illustrate how the analytical procedure generates generic design guidance, required to achieve the bound, without committing to a specific technology. We follow by formally introducing a new technology into the wave energy community, the inerter, capable of implementing the design guidance to enact the required geometry control. Finally, we apply the analytics within a numerical case study of a previously published wave energy converter configuration, and compare the power capture production of that device to one with equivalent hydrodynamics, but with the new geometry control feature set suggested by the new analytical procedure. Our analysis reveals the potential for a ten-fold increase in power capture even under stringent relative displacement constraints.

The design space for ocean wave energy converters is notable for its divergence. To facilitate convergence, and thereby support commercialization, we present a new simple method for analysis and comparison of alternative device architectures at an early stage of the design process. Using Thevenin's theorem, Falnes crafted an ingenious solution for the monochromatic optimal power capture of heaving point absorber devices by forming a mechanical impedance matching problem between the device and the power take-off. However, his solutions are limited by device architecture complexity. In this paper, we use the mechanical circuit framework to extend Falnes' method to form and solve the impedance matching problem and calculate the optimal power capture for converter architectures of arbitrary complexity. The new technique is first applied to reprove Falnes' findings and then to assess a complex converter architecture, proposed by Korde. This work also provides insight into a master-slave relationship between the geometry and power take-off force control problems that are inherent to converter design, and it reveals a hierarchy of distinct design objectives unbeknownst to Korde for his device. Finally, we show how application of the master-slave principle leads to the reduction in the dimensionality of the associated design space.

As the definition of the engineering profession continues to witness a disruptive transformation in the labour market, engineering schools are beginning to recognize the need to facilitate a new approach to education. Such a disruption has lead to the explosion of entrepreneurship education within the boarders of engineering schools in attempt to generate the talent and skills of the future engineer. There is however a gap – engineering schools were never designed to deliver entrepreneurship education. Success in this endeavour relies on a new approach to teaching; one that is founded in a group-based, experiential learning environment. At the University of New Brunswick, entrepreneurship education is a core element offered to all our engineering students. The following article proposes the CRAM – a two day hackathon designed to introduce students to a cohesion of contemporary entrepreneurship practices to accelerate group formation and acquire entrepreneurship skill sets using an inductive teaching approach. The delivery of the CRAM is discussed in detail, along with feedback from the student participants.

More is being asked of graduate teachingassistants (GTAs) as engineering education places anincreased emphasis on teamwork and design. GTAsdirectly influence undergraduate learning. How theyapproach their role can determine if that influence ispositive or negative. Exerting a positive influencerequires GTAs to encourage positive group dynamics,foster self-directed learning, and support individual andteam innovation. In other words, the role of a GTA iscloser to that of a coach than to a teacher or a mentor.Unfortunately, most GTAs lack experience and skill incoaching and facilitation. To help shift our GTAs’perspectives and help them to think, act, and viewthemselves as coaches, we have developed a coachingand facilitation training workshop. We have now offeredthis workshop for a second year. The second offeringincludes a number of important updates which weredriven by three motivations: 1) improved educationaleffectiveness, 2) sustainability, and 3) dissemination.Important changes include a new activity to introduce theuse of open-ended questioning and a workbook whichsupports the workshop activities and acts as a referencesource which participants can consult after the workshop.We have also created a facilitators’ guide so that theworkshop may be delivered by facilitators other than theauthors. All workshop materials have been released undera Creative Commons license to facilitate dissemination.

– The role of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is becoming more demanding as engineering education places an increased emphasis on teamwork and design. For undergraduate students to excel, GTAs must help them form well-functioning teams and encourage them to operate as self-directed learners. In other words, GTAs should operate more as coaches rather than teachers. Many GTAs, unfortunately, lack the basic competencies of to perform as a coach. In this work, we present a 3-hour workshop designed to address this skills gap. The role of a coach and basic theoretical concepts, as well as a simple tool to elicit self-reflection in students are presented through a series of experiential exercises and discussions. The exercises also give participants an opportunity to practice these newly acquired skills while developing confidence in identifying scenarios where the tool may be applied. This workshop has been executed once with a group of 10 graduate engineering students at the University of Victoria. Survey results have been encouraging, we believe that the participants successfully acquired basic coaching competencies and applied them to their interactions with undergraduate students.

As engineering education strives to progress towards a student-centric learning model, a competency gap with future educators becomes more apparent. In particular, the expectation of graduate student teaching assistants (GTAs) in attaining teaching competency to support this dynamic learning environment, often without sufficient training, is unrealistic.In the following paper, we present an implementation of the flexible Teaching Assistant Consultant (TAC) program, which serves to support the development of novice GTA competencies using a discipline-specific model with emphasis on assisting the unique challenges of international teaching assistants.We introduce the specific role of the TAC in terms of core principles and deliverables, and the strategic structure of the campus wide program at the University of Victoria. We conclude by detailing the specific implementation of the program in engineering by illustrating the role and deliverables of the engineering TAC.

Pointers have long been the Achilles heel of mechanical engineering students attempting to master dynamic memory allocation in mechatronic applications. They are abstract and intangible, both opposing characteristics of a discipline based on the concrete (and often hands on) physical world. With this said, pointers are considered an important threshold concept opening the door to the implementation of complex microcontroller applications in our digitally connected world.One of the primary challenges in learning the application of pointers is that the programming syntax and the abstract memory management concepts are often taught simultaneously. The natural progression of learning is to first comprehend the concepts followed by the syntax. Further newer learning theories suggest a conceptual understanding can only result through abstraction of experiences using metaphorical linkages.The following research body is focused on proposing a new strategy for teaching this complex concept using low cost physical props as a palpable interactive visual medium to provide the requisite experiences for concept abstraction. The learning aids are designed to enforce a strict process flow mimicking the invisible actions occurring internal to the microprocessor. Data is collected via questionnaires administered pre and post lecture delivery. Analysis of the results suggest moderate to high improvement in student comprehension of computer memory allocation concepts

The Design Engineering Mentorship Program (DEMP) is a five-day intensive training program focused on developing appropriate competencies in graduate students required to effectively teach engineering design at the undergraduate level.Evolution of the present program is discussed in context of feedback and observations from the now defunct Design Engineering & Instruction program. The structure of the procedural based DEMP program is fully described including new experiential based workshops on creativity and coaching led by a PCC certified coach.Motivating factors and implementation details of each of the workshops are described in detail in context of the competencies attributed to a design instructor.The first instance of the DEMP program will be offered in September 2016.