What Should Abeeha do? an Activity for Phishing Awareness

The increase in Social Engineering (SE) attacks during COVID-19 pandemic has made it imperative to educate people about SE techniques and methods. For the last many years, we have worked on games, which disseminate awareness among the participants about Social Engineering concepts. The aim of this study is to share our newly designed card-based game, which is simple to understand, and can be conducted in classroom environment. © 2022 IEEE.

Smart Short-Term Load Forecasting through Coordination of LSTM-Based Models and Feature Engineering Methods during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Short-term load forecasting is essential for power companies because it is necessary to ensure sufficient capacity. This article proposes a smart load forecasting scheme to forecast the short-term load for an actual sample network in the presence of uncertainties such as weather and the COVID-19 epidemic. The studied electric load data with hourly resolution from the beginning of 2020 to the first seven days of 2021 for the New York Independent Operator is the basis for the modeling. The new components used in this article include the coordination of stacked long short-term memory-based models and feature engineering methods. Also, more accurate and realistic modeling of the problem has been implemented according to the existing conditions through COVID-19 epidemic data. The influential variables for short-term load forecasting through various feature engineering methods have contributed to the problem. The achievements of this research include increasing the accuracy and speed of short-term electric load forecasting, reducing the probability of overfitting during model training, and providing an analytical comparison between different feature engineering methods. Through an analytical comparison between different feature engineering methods, the findings of this article show an increase in the accuracy and speed of short-term load forecasting. The results indicate that combining the stacked long short-term memory model and feature engineering methods based on extra-trees and principal component analysis performs well. The RMSE index for day-ahead load forecasting in the best engineering method for the proposed stacked long short-term memory model is 0.1071. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Student Perceptions of Programming Instruction in a Makerspace vs Synchronous Remote Environment

All first-year students at the J. B. Speed School of Engineering (SSoE) at the University of Louisville (UofL) are required to complete a two-course sequence. The purpose of the two-course sequence is to introduce incoming students to the fundamentals and profession of engineering. The first course in the sequence is titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice I (ENGR 110) and primarily focuses on introduction to and practice with fundamental engineering skills. The second course Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111) is a makerspace-based course primarily focused on application and integration of the fundamentals learned in ENGR 110. ENGR 111 includes a variety of fundamental skills in its instruction, one of which is programming. Therefore, all disciplines of SSoE engineering students are exposed to the basics and applications of programming through this course sequence. Programming instruction in ENGR 111 is designed to include relevant software development skills that students might encounter in the engineering profession. The students have learned initial programming skills in their ENGR 110 course through the Python programming language. In ENGR 111, students practice programming skills learned in ENGR 110 on two different platforms: Arduino Microcontrollers (Arduino) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). In normal face-to-face semesters, students are put into teams of 3 to 4 and given modules to develop and practice these skills (two for Arduino, two for PLCs). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ENGR 111 was augmented into a synchronous remote course to avoid close proximity and shared tools in the makerspace. Arduino programming instruction was performed using Tinkercad (tinkercad.com), a website that allows for Arduino programming and circuitry simulations. PLC instruction was performed utilizing a free online PLC simulator website, “PLCfiddle” [1]. At the end of each semester, students take a survey on their perceptions of the course. Included in this survey are questions pertaining to programming instruction. These questions assess student confidence in programming and platform preference. Results of these questions from Spring 2019 (a makerspace iteration) and Spring 2021 (a remote iteration) are compared in this paper. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Converting a First-Year Engineering, Makerspace Course into COVID-Necessitated Fully-Online Synchronous Delivery and Related Student Perceptions

This complete Evidence-based Practice paper will describe efforts and outcomes in redesigning and implementing a makerspace-based course during a time of COVID-necessitated fully online synchronous learning. This course is an introductory engineering course that all first-year engineering students at the J. B. Speed School of Engineering (SSoE) at the University of Louisville (UofL) are required to take. The course, titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111), is primarily focused on application and integration of fundamental engineering skills introduced in a prerequisite course ENGR 110. ENGR 111 houses SSoE's Cornerstone Project, and is extensively based in active learning pedagogy taking place in a large university makerspace, with the vast majority of class activities typically taught pre-COVID through extensive hands-on pedagogical approaches. Although the ENGR 111 structure is the antithesis of an online pedagogical setting, course administrators were forced to redesign the ENGR 111 experience during the Spring and Summer 2021 semesters to online delivery due to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of the university makerspace was not feasible due to the close-proximity nature of numerous aforementioned hands-on activities for as many as 96 students per class, and the provision of multiple shared tools amongst six different classes. Therefore, the online format challenged instructors to retain a heavy focus on teamwork (an institutionally identified key element of the ENGR 111 experience), in addition to the active learning environment of the conventional course. Prior to the pandemic, ENGR 111 was an innovative course in its formal utilization of the makerspace setting and extensive integration of active learning, while the ENGR 111 redesign is innovative in maintaining course learning objectives despite the online format. The details provided in this paper for how to implement an active, hands-on, makerspace engineering course in an online format are conducive to adaptation for course instructors throughout the United States, as all software, platforms, and/or websites discussed are typically free for faculty and students alike. Details within this paper will be particularly focused on a handful of course curriculum features that were the most challenging to accommodate in the online format, including teamwork, experimentation, the ENGR 111 design challenge, programming and circuitry, and the Cornerstone Project. Qualitative and quantitative measures of student perceptions during the online ENGR 111 experience were collected at the culmination of both semesters. Over 400 students shared their perceptions and reasoning of course features and topics that they found to be effective despite the online setting. They also shared perceptions and reasoning of course features and topics that they thought would have been more effective under normal face-to-face instruction. Additionally, at the end of the course for the past several years, students have completed validated, quantitative surveys grounded in value-expectancy theory, including the Perceived Belonging Uncertainty (PBU) and Interest in Engineering (IIE) scales. The qualitative responses were analyzed using grounded theory methodologies to extract emergent themes. Finally, a comparative analysis between the quantitative, belonging and interest, responses from students of the 2019 cohort that took ENGR 111 prior to the pandemic versus the 2021 cohort that experienced the online iteration of the ENGR 111 course was analyzed with independent samples t-test to explore if there were significant differences in these key constructs that could be ascribed to the online makerspace format vs. normal face-to-face. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Work in Progress: Remote Instruction of Circuitry in a Multidisciplinary Introduction to Engineering First-year Course

This paper is focused on a course redesign transitioning from a hardware-based course into a course taught remotely. The J. B. Speed School of Engineering (SSoE) at the University of Louisville (UofL) has a two-course sequence that all first-year SSoE students are required to complete. This two-course sequence is designed to introduce incoming students to the profession and fundamentals of engineering. The first course is titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice I (ENGR 110), and primarily focuses on introduction to and practice with fundamental engineering skills. The second course, Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111) is typically a makerspace-based course primarily focused on application and integration of the fundamentals learned in ENGR 110. Included amongst numerous skills institutionally identified as “fundamental” were programming and basic circuitry. Therefore, all disciplines of SSoE engineering students are exposed to the basics of circuitry and programming through ENGR 111 pedagogy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this makerspace course is to be taught remotely in the spring semester of 2021. The instructional team felt that there were too many shared tools and teams were too close together to safely continue the course in a makerspace environment. This remote teaching has posed the instructional team some unique challenges due to the hands-on nature of the ENGR 111 course. Students are typically in face-to-face teams of 3 or 4 students and each group is given an Arduino, breadboard, and circuit components. The given assignments start out with basic circuity and Arduino programming, followed by utilizing an Arduino to communicate with created circuits. The assignments are designed to help the first-year students gain comfort in circuitry and programming. The instructional team has decided to use Tinkercad, which is a free online collection of software tools provided by Autodesk. Many people are only aware of Tinkercad as a 3D modeling programming, however in 2017 Autodesk merged its “123D Circuits” into Tinkercad [1] [2]. This makes Tinkercad an ideal platform to use for circuitry and Arduino programming. The paper will further describe the design of the assignments, instructional team expectations from the students, the environment in which the students are using Tinkercad, as well as looking at expected course outcomes using the platform. This topic is a work in progress as data for evidence-based analyses will not be fully procured until after publication. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Applying Software Engineering to Teach Online Project-Based Software Engineering Courses

Software engineering (SE) courses are facing increased challenges from emerging online learning platforms. Teaching project-based SE (PBSE), however, remains complex because SE development itself is complex, broad and requires constant practice to master. In this work, we propose to apply SE to teach online PBSE courses. We present the instructional design model of PBSE course, which revolves around an iterative software development model that uses a software framework to help students practise software development. We discuss our experience in applying the course model to a recent PBSE course. The course was delivered in a hybrid mode in order to adapt to the frequent Covid-19 lockdowns in Hanoi, Vietnam. The course uses an integrated LMS consisting of the Google and GitHub classroom platforms. The former helps manage the student class and teaching materials, the latter helps students learn to collaboratively work on and manage a software project online. © 2021 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.