ABSTRACT
Engineering programs emphasize students career advancement by ensuring that engineering students gain technical and professional capabilities during their four-year study. In a traditional engineering laboratory, students "learn by doing", and laboratory equipment facilitates their discipline-specific knowledge acquisition. Unfortunately, there were significant educational uncertainties, such as COVID-19, which halted laboratory activities for an extended period, causing challenges for students to perform and obtain practical experiments on campus. To overcome these challenges, this research proposes and develops an Artificial Intelligence-based smart tele-assisting technology application to digitalize first-year engineering students practical experience by incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms using the HoloLens 2. This application improves virtual procedural demonstrations and assists first-year engineering students in conducting practical activities remotely. This research also applies various machine learning algorithms to identify and classify different images of electronic components and detect the positions of each component on the breadboard (using the HoloLens 2). Based on a comparative analysis of machine learning algorithms, a hybrid CNN-SVM (Convolutional Neural Network - Support Vector Machine) model is developed and is observed that a hybrid model provides the highest average prediction accuracy compared to other machine learning algorithms. With the help of AR (HoloLens 2) and the hybrid CNN-SVM model, this research allows students to reduce component placement errors on a breadboard and increases students competencies, decision-making abilities, and technical skills to conduct simple laboratory practices remotely. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Contribution: The study provides empirical evidence and a deeper understanding of COVID-19’s impact on first-year engineering (FYE) students’learning experiences and motivation while accounting for gender and race/ethnicity-based variations. Background: In the Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced campuses to close and shift unexpectedly to emergency remote instruction. These rapid transitions impacted all students, including FYE students. Research Questions: Based on the importance of the first-year experience of engineering students, this study investigated two research questions: 1) How does the rapid transition to emergency remote instruction affect FYE students’learning experiences? and 2) How do students’learning experiences during the pandemic relate to their motivation (self-efficacy and task value)? Methodology: A multimethod approach is used to investigate students’experiences on two dimensions: 1) engagement, learning, effort, concentration, interest, and interactions and 2) time management, study settings, and resources, by using ANOVA, regression models, and structural equation modeling (SEM). Results: Students who reported increased value of learning experiences reported higher self-efficacy and task value. Also, the results indicated that international students reported increased learning of new concepts, concentration in the class, interactions with instructors, and higher self-efficacy, while White and Asian students reported higher task value and availability of resources. IEEE
ABSTRACT
Building Information Modelling is being adopted worldwide and universities are thus expected to provide the market with new professionals with BIM knowledge and skills. However, introduction of this theme into the curriculum can be challenging to teaching staff. Having successful implementation examples can help carrying on this task. This paper presents the structure, syllabus, adopted tools and activities of an introductory BIM course offered to first-year engineering students. Implemented with only 2 credits, it covers BIM fundamental concepts and develops collaboration skills and abilities with BIM software tools. It was effectively deployed on big classes and successfully offered both in face-to-face and remote modes, adopting a practice focus. An innovative organization for student group projects was adopted, enabling student participation on several projects, performing a different role in each one. Perceived benefits to students' development are reported. The covid-19 pandemics impact is discussed. Future improvements in the course are suggested. Overall results achieved were considered very good. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
CONTEXT In wake of the COVID-19 situation in 2020, when universities were faced with the transition from face-to-face learning to online delivery, many educators found themselves tasked with having to convert previously classroom-based teaching material to an equivalent online adaption. The transition was particularly challenging in a first-year engineering subject where hands-on laboratory experiments play an important part in the learning of basic mechanics principles as a foundation in engineering. Adaptation of physical hands-on experiments into the form of interactive virtual simulations was necessary to ensure students had an equally comprehensive laboratory experience in the online delivery mode. PURPOSE This paper describes the development and implementation of a virtual laboratory for a set of mechanics experiments as an alternative to the physical hands-on laboratory. The interactive simulation application replicates the procedures of a physical mass-spring system investigation that applies two fundamental mechanics concepts, resultant forces and principle of moments. APPROACH The virtual laboratory application is a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) integrated with a program code that models a physical spring system, developed in MATLAB App Designer. Key features of the application include animated outputs and virtual measurement tools that emulates the procedures of the actual experiment and MATLAB modelling that takes into account inconsistencies that may arise in real measurements. For deployment purposes, the simulation program in App Designer was compiled into a standalone executable and run using the MATLAB runtime environment. OUTCOMES The virtual laboratory activity was successfully conducted during the online workshop classes in the first-year engineering subject at the University of Melbourne across a cohort of over 600 students. The simulation application in the virtual setting achieved similar learning outcomes as the experiments in the physical setting, but the activity was completed in significantly shorter times as compared to the expected physical hands-on. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The virtual experiments offered efficiencies over physical experiments in terms of minimising experimental procedure delays and allowing more focus on concepts and theories but unavoidably compromising other hands-on experience such as equipment set-up, calibration, real-world experimental observation, and troubleshooting. For a more comprehensive virtual laboratory experience, future work to model the virtual environment more accurately to represent real world behaviour is recommended. Copyright © Huey Yee Chan, 2021.
ABSTRACT
Learning to use computational tools is a critical aspect of many first-year engineering courses. Students in these courses can have varying degrees of prior exposure to computational tools and often exhibit a wide range of intrinsic motivation for learning these skills. Interviews with first-year engineering students were conducted to study the degree to which motivation correlated with intended major within engineering. The pilot round of interviews was conducted in the spring of 2021. This pilot study used the same data set of 8 interviews to progressively refine both the survey and interview collection in the 2021 - 2022 academic year. This paper will review the results of the pilot study and detail the process used to develop and use the finalized protocol and coding schemes for a planned series of 20 interviews in Summer 2022. While this technique developed because of limited data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been beneficial to the researcher and may provide guidance for future researchers. © 2022 IEEE.
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The Academy of Engineering Success program at West Virginia University (WVU) is a cohort-based integrated Engineering Bridge Program designed for non-calculus ready first-year engineering students. During COVID times, AcES encountered challenges in recruiting underrepresented students. We realized that the recruitment method needed to be modified to attract them. After applying new recruitment methods for 3 weeks, AcES participants were diversified, resulting in 30% female, 20% underrepresented minorities, 30% low-income, and 20% first-generation in the cohort. Our research aims to (1) analyze AcES enrollment data before and after applying the new recruitment strategy, (2) conduct surveys to understand the effectiveness of different recruitment methods in diversifying the cohort, and (3) devise a plan to improve future recruitment efforts to attract engineering students with a diverse background, particularly the underrepresented populations. This paper reported progress of the first objective. © 2022 First-Year Engineering Experience, FYEE 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This Evidence-Based Practice paper contains a study about the similarities and differences in team development among first-year engineering students during an introductory design course at a major university in the eastern United States. The study contained ten teams that operated in a totally online environment in Spring 2021, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and ten teams that operated in person in Spring 2022. All teams consisted of students in their second semester of college. © 2022 First-Year Engineering Experience, FYEE 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The pedagogy of a first-year engineering course in manufacturing is presented. This course entitled Manufacturing and Society involves collaboration with social science, is based on industrial robots as the central theme to attract students’ interests and utilizes the flipped classroom approach for delivery. We hypothesize that, in one semester, recent high school graduates will be able to gain knowledge in manufacturing by learning the computer-aided engineering (CAD) software, applying CAD to design a penholder, fabricating the penholder using additive manufacturing and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software, programming the robot to create a toolpath for the pen, drawing using the pen on the penholder guided by a robot, and elaborating on impacts of robotic painting on society from a social science perspective. This course is designed to give students, regardless of their intended major in engineering, broad knowledge in manufacturing via 10 engineering, 3 social science, and 10 technical communication lectures;8 labs;and 4 projects. The social science lectures and discussions focus on how knowledge about society can be used to inform design and manufacturing decisions, social science research methods for understanding how engineers and technology can impact people's lives, and changing trends in work, the workplace, and the future workforce as it relates to manufacturing. This course aimed to give undergraduate first-year engineering students a positive view of advanced manufacturing and its impact on society. Student evaluations and comments were positive and affirmed the learning objective of teaching manufacturing to the first-year engineering students. The flipped classroom approach was demonstrated to be ideal during the COVID-19 pandemic with limited capacity for in-person lectures and labs. The use of flipped classrooms allowed students to learn at their own pace, review and reinforce knowledge, have a closer interaction with instructors, and reduce the number of technical errors using simulation tools. This course with the support of flipped classroom pedagogy can be successfully implemented in the post-pandemic era, devoting the time of the class to answer questions, expand upon the class content and have a closer in-person interaction with students. © 2022
ABSTRACT
This Work in Progress Paper presents techniques adapted to teach first-year engineering courses post-pandemic. Challenges faced by students and faculty will also be presented in this paper along with some guidance and best practices. In March 2020, COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic that began impacting higher education during the Spring semester. Many land-grant universities were not fully equipped with the tools to offer the best learning experience to students due to lock-down and the inability to access the laboratories and teaching equipment. This global pandemic had caused the universities to change their operations and impelled instructors to switch to online instruction halfway into the semester. Many universities began exploring options and investing their resources to devise teaching pedagogies that best fit the needs of their students. Although universities had been utilizing some learning management systems such as Blackboard, D2L, Canvas, etc., an unanticipated need for online instruction impelled a mandated use of these learning management systems for full content delivery. Although engineering courses could easily be revamped to distance learning platforms, there were some challenges due to the nature of the coursework and assessment of outcomes. Adhering to the social distancing guidelines and university mask mandates along with the availability of vaccination have made it possible to return to in-person teaching and learning. The purpose of this paper is to: a) present some of the challenges faced by the first-year engineering students during the transition to and from distance learning approaches, b) share some of the results from the assessment of student attitudes during this transition, and c) share some of the best practices adopted by the instructors during these uncertain times. The first-year engineering curriculum usually involves fundamental concepts and provides an opportunity for students to explore several engineering disciplines. In a normal learning environment, engineering courses tend to be challenging due to higher expectations for problem-solving, mathematics, and scientific concepts, and adding external factors such as the pandemic adds more complications. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, students and instructors have been under constant pressure to satisfy the basic requirements of attaining student learning objectives. In this process of attaining the objectives, several challenges had been encountered and overcome in different ways. The focus of this research work is to study the first-year engineering course and present the challenges associated with the delivery of the course content, teaching engineering concepts and applications in a remote setting, and communication between instructors and students during the lock-down period. This paper also presents some of the teaching strategies that have been investigated by the instructors to assist students during difficult times while balancing student expectations. This work in progress study was initiated in Spring 2020 at a small regional campus of The Ohio State University. Challenges arising due to the transition to and from distance learning modalities were observed in the first-year engineering courses, Fundamentals of Engineering I and Fundamentals of Engineering II. These courses are two-credit hours each and introduce engineering problem-solving, data analysis, project-based learning, computer programming, 3-D Modeling and simulation, project management, and teamwork. Teaching strategies adopted by the instructors including restructuring the course, revisioning the assessment of course goals, and utilizing alternative approaches to assess student performance will be discussed in this paper. The findings of this paper will provide an opportunity for educators to learn from the unique experience and develop strategies to address the continuously changing teaching and learning environments that have evolved as a result of the pandemic. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted society and engineering education as a whole. This paper describes the strategies and improvements that were implemented post COVID-19 pandemic to a two-credit hour engineering course targeted for first-year engineering and exploratory studies students at a Southeastern Public Research One Institution. It introduces the Grand Challenges and a corresponding scholars program defined by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) that link society and engineering to improve and maintain quality of life for the twenty-first century. This course was developed to enhance student development in the essential engineering mindset and interdisciplinary system thinking to address the prescribed global engineering grand challenges. It interweaves engineering with the social and political sciences, encouraging students to explore the interactions between society and technology, including the influences of human behavior, culture, economics, ethics, and policy on the development and implementation of technologies. The course delivery is hybrid in nature, where students meet and actively engage face-to-face once a week and participate in an asynchronous meeting in the other half of the week. The curriculum includes invited speakers and experts in the various engineering disciplines, recorded videos, a midterm research essay, and a final group poster presentation and one-minute video on one of the Grand Challenges. The final presentation encompasses the four themes of the NAE's Grand Challenges and showcases the students' gained and applied knowledge for exploring opportunities to solve complex engineering challenges. The course is offered in the fall and summer semesters to over 1,500 students per academic year. All students who take this course and matriculate into their engineering major then can apply to the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) to participate in the program as early as their sophomore year. Approximately 30 students are accepted into the university GCSP and may begin participating in the GCSP as soon as the summer prior to their sophomore year and have three years to complete the five required competencies of this program. Approximately 90 scholars actively participate in this program every year (sophomore, junior and senior engineering students). The five competencies include talent, multiculturalism, multidisciplinary studies, entrepreneurship and social cognition. Typically, the scholars start taking engineering classes and start working with research mentors to assist with the completion of the five competencies that prepare them to solve these challenges. Most incoming scholars lack experience in identifying specific research mentors. This program assists with that task. Through the first competency, also known as talent, the scholars engage in hands-on projects to help design innovative solutions through deep immersion in an academically rigorous environment. This paper describes the improvement efforts post COVID-19 to the course goals, structures, designs, and targeted recruitment efforts for the GCSP during the face-to-face and online course delivery, focusing on engineering research and introducing interested students to how to identify a research topic and choose a mentor. In addition, it includes reflections and insights gained from the course design, development, and facilitation, and offers future recommendations for improvements. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Introductory engineering courses teach a range of foundational topics to first-year engineering students. An ethics component is often presented as one of these broad topics, usually through a case study module that examines past catastrophic engineering events. In this Research-to-Practice paper, we present findings from a study using role-play scenarios (RPSs) to teach ethics to first-year engineering students. Role-play discussions serve as a collaborative means for students to discuss and negotiate ethical issues to reach an actionable consensus. We designed a role-play scenario that places students on a university task force that is evaluating the adoption or rejection of facial recognition technologies (FRT) to track and identify the COVID-19 reporting status of students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Students were asked to prepare and then participate in role-play discussions which were then assessed for learning. The data supporting this research comes from the role-play discussion transcripts of 86 first-year engineering students who participated in four sections of an undergraduate engineering concepts class during Fall 2020. Our findings show that students successfully identified a breadth of ethical issues, dilemmas, and topics related to the use of FRT on campus. In addition, students employed an ethical reasoning process to create a group consensus with their peers, supporting the overall goal of developing a more situated understanding of ethical decision-making. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a new set of infrastructures and online interactive tools that can be employed to motivate students to learn programming languages. The tools were used to experiment in one of the introductory first-year engineering courses. The final project of the course requires implementing an AI program for a game called “Reversi''. Reversi is a medium to hard level programming project that has been used in the course for several years requiring an immediate restructuring. Furthermore, due to COVID-19 and the restriction of in-person teaching, it has been a challenge for educators to excite, support, and encourage students. The new infrastructure provided an interactive platform for the students to familiarize themselves with the Reversi game project. It also provided a leaderboard, an interactive scoreboard, allowing students to compete with their classmates. The tools can instantaneously synchronize to students' code submission to help students check their latest ranking among their classmates in real-time. This increased students' level of engagement and learning. In addition, it allowed students to collaborate with their fellow classmates and discuss their algorithms. The tools and platform developed can also be employed in other courses as well other programming games. The result from students' surveys and the active trend of the class online discussion forum indicates that the new online interactive system created a positive atmosphere and increased students' motivation in learning programming languages. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Connection with peers is one of the most important factors in determining the persistence of students in engineering. During the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering classes transitioned to fully online learning. Little research has been done on the effect of online learning on students' social networks. This study sought to understand the factors that affect the connections students are making within a first-year engineering course at The Ohio State University. The study included the university's honors and standard offerings of the course. Participants were sent a Qualtrics survey that included ranking their level of connection to every student in each class on a scale from 0 (Don't Know) to 4 (Strong connection). Students were also asked Likert scale and opinion questions on their feelings of belonging in engineering and online learning. In total, there were 32 usable responses. Overall, females self-reported a higher average number of “Strong” and “Good” connections than males. A Mann-Whitney U test showed that this difference in number of connections was significant. To assess which factors affected the number of Strong and Good connections students self-reported, several ANOVA tests were conducted. These tests found that gender, feeling supported in the class, and class offering (honors vs. standard) yielded significant differences between groups. The study also found that out of all classes, over 85% of students strongly agreed that they would have formed better connections with their peers had their classes been in person. Because a majority of each class did not participate in the survey, the conclusions on gender and connections were limited to the students who responded. Future work will include creating social network diagrams in order to visualize connections within each class. Future work should also collect additional responses and include follow-up interviews to better understand student perspectives on connections and virtual learning. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 impacted delivery of the first-year engineering design curriculum throughout the post-secondary system. Vancouver Island University (VIU) is a mid-sized teaching institution where students typically take one year of engineering studies prior to transferring to a larger engineering school to complete their degrees. Due to COVID-19, VIU shifted instruction of the first-year engineering design curriculum entirely to remote learning environment during the 2019/20 academic year. Students were not expected to be in physical contact at any point during the term. In making this transition, factors considered included: • Ensuring the learning outcomes of the curriculum continued to meet the requirements of VIU's transfer partners. • Demonstrating empathy towards student mental health and circumstances during the pandemic. • Focusing on change for the long-term, not specific to the COVID-19 period. • Mitigating potential academic misconduct challenges. In response, the first-year engineering design curriculum was adapted to a flipped classroom model using a modular approach for content. For each module, a framework of individual and team-based readiness assessment quizzes, videos highlighting key content, associated studio activities, and a final module exam was used to assess student learning. For each term, deliberate activities that aimed to help students build resilience to the stress of isolation included a personal time off (PTO) planning and reflection exercise, creating a community discussion board, providing videos emphasizing learning and health within a university environment, and encouraging peer-supportive learning. The effectiveness and impacts of the changes made to the design curriculum were examined informally during the Sept-Dec and the Jan-Apr terms through mid-term and end-of-term student surveys which included both open-ended and Likert scale responses. Approximately, three-quarters of responding students indicated that the online discussion promoted interest in the course content, and that the course organization was easy to follow. An area of suggested improvement included video content, which was not generally felt to contribute significantly towards student understanding of the key topics. It is unclear, however, if the weaker response was due the content itself or student preference for learning face-to-face. Informal feedback provided through the students' PTO reflections often showed the students modifying their original plan due to the on-going impact of COVID-19 within the community, and seasonable change. In general, despite changes in specific individual activities, students maintained deliberate plans to keep in touch with friends and family, and indicated the framing of a plan, even if not followed precisely, brought comfort during times of challenge. This paper discusses the COVID-19 adaptions made within the first-year engineering design curriculum, and reflects on their impact fulfilling the required learning outcomes, mitigating student mental health issues, and addressing academic misconduct. It will further articulate the adaptations that are planned to be continued within the first-year experience as students return for face-to-face instruction. The impact of these changes will continue to be studied over the coming academic year. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
This complete evidence-based practice paper examines the experience of two peer mentors, known as Student Engagement Liaisons (SEL), as they worked to cultivate community and sense of belonging for first year engineering students. Over the past two years, the educational pendulum has swung wildly as students have gone from in-person to online learning and back again. Many students continue to navigate a changing landscape as they straddle between the two worlds of in-person and remote learning with some classes continuing to meet online and others being fully in person. These abrupt transitions have left many students struggling to develop meaningful connections with their peers, faculty, and their educational programs, all of which have negative ramifications on their academic progress and sense of belonging. This investigation uses a critical constructivist theoretical approach to explore how two SELs, who were tasked with enhancing student engagement and building social networks for first year engineering students, modified support mechanisms in response to the changing teaching and learning modalities. Of particular interest is how the SEL program has evolved during this tumultuous time, the mentors' experiences exploring and developing new ways of connecting students, and the impact of the experience on the mentors themselves. The results indicate a shift in focus solely driven by the mentors, along with a willingness to reframe activities, events, and support measures to meet the dynamic needs of the students. Their ability to listen, pivot, and adapt to changing needs of students indicates a commitment to creating inclusive and accessible social environments through community centered solutions. We recognize that these new ways might be innovative because of the circumstances, but they can also continue to be integrated as ways to support and engage students, particularly because they were created by students. The SELs used the COVID-19 pivots as an opportunity to reinvent what it means to mentor their peers and, with that, have explored and experimented with new ways of creating community. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the evolution of a first-year engineering mechanics course, Solid Mechanics I, over the two iterations that it has been flipped. It discusses the teaching strategies that have and haven't worked when delivering the course in both an online and hybrid approach. These include recommended durations for lecture videos, types of assessments, grade distributions, etc. Flipping the classroom was a result of the forced transition online due to Covid-19. To best support the students in the unprecedented times, the instructor opted to combine components from both asynchronous and synchronous teaching styles. Asynchronous lecture videos were accompanied by synchronous class time where the instructor clarified concepts, demonstrated real-life applications, solved higher-level problems, and implemented group activities. A combination of these active learning strategies was the key to structuring the course to keep the students engaged despite being online for all, or part, of the term as delivered in Fall 2020 and Fall 2021, respectively. In the Fall 2020 iteration, the course was delivered fully online to roughly 325 students in civil, environmental, geological, and architectural engineering. Since then, the course had been improved and adjusted in response to the students' feedback collected from an end-of-term survey. Approximately 270 students were enrolled in the course in the subsequent Fall 2021 term which took a hybrid approach as Covid-19 restrictions began to lighten. With students being able to learn in-person again, the course had shifted to emphasize student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions. Feedback became immediate, allowing for the course to be molded to the students' satisfaction as the term progressed. Changes between the two years have been documented in the paper along with recommendations for future adaptations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
A first-year mandatory engineering project-based course aimed at developing an engineering mindset was taught through students engaging in active learning strategies built on the design-thinking framework by Ulrich and Eppinger. Course outcomes were achieved via students' participation in the fabrication of an autonomous robotic vehicle facilitated through practical hands-on activities, group discussions, and laboratory modules. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this formerly in-person course adopted a synchronous teaching model and used online instructional tools for lectures, group activities, and project support. The robotic project helped introduce students to engineering principles by employing multi-developmental phases for creating a robot. The teaching approach also provided students an engineering design experience while working in interdisciplinary teams with members serving unique engineering roles such as design, hardware, software, project, or testing lead. Students were required to design and fabricate a relevant prototype for stakeholders and, while doing so, learn and acquire essential competencies and skillsets relevant to engineering professions. Course methodology involved weekly assignments and the acquisition of project kits by individual students. The engineering mindset was assessed through content knowledge of inclusive modules in electronics, programming, 3D printing, innovation, and data analysis assignments. Learning outcomes include using software, hardware-based technologies, and research-based inquiries to design, fabricate, test, and improve an autonomous robot. Measurement of these outcomes was accomplished through course assessments, student evaluations, and the final project showcase results. This remote course structure fostered an engineering mindset, technical know-how, innovation and promoted essential competencies like teamwork, leadership, and critical thinking. Despite the pandemic-transformed pedagogy, students acquired relevant toolsets for manufacturing, synthesis, analysis, and technology that support engineering solutions. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.
ABSTRACT
Building Information Modelling is being adopted worldwide and universities are thus expected to provide the market with new professionals with BIM knowledge and skills. However, introduction of this theme into the curriculum can be challenging to teaching staff. Having successful implementation examples can help carrying on this task. This paper presents the structure, syllabus, adopted tools and activities of an introductory BIM course offered to first-year engineering students. Implemented with only 2 credits, it covers BIM fundamental concepts and develops collaboration skills and abilities with BIM software tools. It was effectively deployed on big classes and successfully offered both in face-to-face and remote modes, adopting a practice focus. An innovative organization for student group projects was adopted, enabling student participation on several projects, performing a different role in each one. Perceived benefits to students’ development are reported. The covid-19 pandemics impact is discussed. Future improvements in the course are suggested. Overall results achieved were considered very good. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
This full paper, in the research to practice category, focuses on student preferences for online versus face-to-face instruction. Spring Semester, 2020 started as usual but proved to be anything but usual. Instead, in a seven-day turnaround, the first-year engineering program at Michigan Technological University moved from a face-to-face, highly interactive studio environment to a remote/synchronous environment. At the end of the semester, our University and many others across the United States conducted a short survey of undergraduate students on their preference of face-to-face versus online instruction. Results showed a strong preference for face-to-face instruction. However, to adequately consider the extensive ranges of approach in both umbrella terms ("face-to-face instruction" and "online instruction"), we need to unpack the surface results. This paper reports on a short survey given to second-semester students in our College of Engineering, First-Year Engineering Program, and students in the first-year course in Systems Engineering. The survey sought to gather student preferences for two variations of our instructional models in current use in our first-year program: (a) remote/synchronous instruction versus (b) a hybrid environment that included faceto- face instruction with mandatory masking and social distancing. Results showed that students, at worst, held preferences that were generally not statistically different in terms of preferences. The several exceptions that did show significance showed numerical differences that were not of practical importance, with one exception. The core takeaway from our study is that determining student preferences for "face-to-face instruction" versus "distance learning" needs to be unpacked to enable students to register reasoned judgments and set the stage for meaningful results.