Thursday Sessions

Thursday Sessions Session T1A: Mini Workshop - Great Problems Lead to Great Projects: A First Year Seminar Course Chair: Kristin Wobbe, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon A MINI WORKSHOP - GREAT PROBLEMS LEAD TO GREAT PROJECTS: A FIRST YEAR SEMINAR COURSE Kristin Wobbe and Arthur Heinricher In 2007 WPI initiated the Great Problems Seminars to engage First Year students with current events, societal problems and human needs while developing skills that will facilitate subsequent project work. These seminars focus on large global issues – energy and its utilization, food and hunger, disease and healthcare delivery and the NAE Grand Challenges. Each is led by two faculty from disparate departments who expose the students to the complexity of the problem using a number of disciplinary perspectives. Students develop information literacy, effective writing and speaking skills, while working in teams on short assignments. For the final project student teams work with faculty supervision to analyze some aspect of the problem and/or develop a partial solution. The seminars culminate in a Project presentation day where all student groups present a poster on their work. We have assessment data that show that the courses achieve their desired outcomes. The special session will review the motivation to create these courses and provide information about course organization and logistics. Participants will review student projects, discuss the preparation required, and determine how elements of this program can be utilized on their home campus. Ideas generated by participants will be shared with all. Session T1B: Special Session - Mixed Methods in Engineering Education: Developing Research Questions and Mixing Tables Chair: Erin Crede, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - MIXED METHODS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: DEVELOPING RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND MIXING TABLES Erin Crede, Maura Borrego and Elizabeth Creamer The aim of this special session is to re-introduce the concept of “mixing” as a part of a mixed methods study design. Engineering education researchers are increasingly choosing mixed methods for their study designs, but may not be obtaining the full benefit from their use. In order to highlight specific aspects of the definition of mixed methods research, groups will establish a qualitative, quantitative and “mixing” research questions using the topic of Engineering Student Retention. Through collaborative development of the mixing research question, participants will be exposed to various ways to integrate qualitative and quantitative data. After discussing the combinations of qualitative, quantitative and mixing research questions in the large group, participant teams will sketch out possible mixing tables that integrate their qualitative and quantitative data. Creation of the mixing tables will further explore the integration possibilities, allowing participants to explore ways to maximize the potential of their data. This session is highly collaborative and encourages participation from researchers from all backgrounds (qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods) and experience levels. Session T1C: Curriculum Innovations in Teaching Design Chair: Eric Pappas, James Madison University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon C AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SENIOR DESIGN EXPERIENCE USING BIODIESEL VEHICLES Steven G. Northrup An interdisciplinary team design experience has been conducted successfully for several years as part of the senior engineering laboratory effort at Western New England College. Recent modifications to the project include the adaptation of a biodiesel powered airplane engine to power a land-based vehicle. The project objectives are to introduce the students to the design process typically associated with new product development. The approach is to have student teams develop a biodiesel powered vehicle prototype which can transport payloads between two points up a sloped parking surface as quickly as possible. The effort requires the parallel development of a computerized performance prediction system, the vehicle itself, and electrical and computer systems to gather data to validate the 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 77 Thursday Sessions performance prediction. The students enjoy the effort and learn a lot about real world product design and development problems including team dynamics. This paper describes the details of the design experience, discusses efforts that were found to be both successful and unsuccessful, and presents sample team prototype results. LOW COST RUNWAY INCURSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR GENERAL AVIATION AIRPORTS. Ibibia Dabipi, J. Bryan Burrows-McElwain and Chris Hartman LOW COST RUNWAY INCURSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR GENERAL AVIATION AIRPORTS. I.K. Dabipi, J.B. Burrows-McElwain, C. Hartman University of Maryland Eastern Shore, (phone: 410-651-6489, (fax: 410-651-6486) [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to a freshman engineering design project where students were required to design a novel low cost runway incursion detection system that might have future application for small general aviation airport operations by applying sound engineering problem solving criterion. Given the direction of Aviation towards autonomous navigation, this project provides a meaningful medium to educate freshman engineering students on both concept and teamwork principles. The goals of the project were (a) to introduce collaboration across disciplines given the students’ intended majors, (b) to enhance scientific inquiry, (c) to foster communication among the group as well as enhance communication between the students and the client who provides the project objectives, and (d) the group management structure and its implication as it applies to achieving the overall objectives of the project. As an integrated department with both Engineering and Aviation Science faculty, it was natural for the Aviation Science faculty to serve as clients, who then generate plausible problems that can benefit both the Aviation Science and Engineering students in the program and these problems are then used as the basis for a structured engineering design approach for introducing engineering design fundamentals to the freshman engineering class. The unique nature of the assignment lies in the need for the concept to be low cost and practical. Team leadership styles were evaluated and compared against design outcomes. This paper examines both the engineering aspect of the students’ learning as well as their leadership growth and interaction between group members as well as the interaction with the client. With students from various engineering backgrounds involved in the course, this paper also provides the audience the ability to examine the applicability of this approach to other subject areas. APPLICATION OF MODERN ENGINEERING TOOLS IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE STEPPED SHAFT: TEACHING A STRUCTURED PROBLEM-SOLVING APPROACH USING ENERGY TECHNIQUES Carla J. Egelhoff, Edwin M. Odom and Benjamin J. Wiest The importance of analysis and design of shafts is well-described in most Machine Design textbooks. Shafts are subjected to both combined and variable loading, resulting in fatigue-mode stress and deflection; to further complicate the calculations, many shafts are of a stepped or tapered cross-sectional area. A thorough review of the textbooks available and the wider body of mechanical engineering literature revealed a paucity of strategies for either teaching or conducting the analysis required for proper design. In this paper we describe a structured problem-solving approach which uses the students’ understanding of free-body-diagrams, shear and moment equations, and energy methods. With the development of note-taking handouts supplied to the students, the structured analysis is lead by the instructor using Castigliano’s theory of internal energy. The problem formulation is kept general until the last step. The numerical integration can be performed software of the students’ choice. We have found that using this approach accomplishes a richer, deeper understanding of design among our students and increases their confidence as indicated by our pre- and post-activity assessment. WORK IN PROGRESS - IMPACT OF EARLY DESIGN INSTRUCTION ON CAPSTONE EXPERIENCES Mark L. Chang and Jessica Townsend In the Olin College curriculum, students have significant, early, and continuous exposure to user-oriented design principles. As a result, our students have a very user-centered approach to problem solving that has affected our yearlong, industry-sponsored capstone in several ways. We have reflected on five years of capstone engagements in order to learn how our program has changed because of the design emphasis in our curriculum. The significance of our work is to inform the many departments that are already undertaking design-centric curriculum reform on how they may modify their capstone experiences to best take advantage of new student understanding, and what to expect when using design principles to engage industry problems. INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO TEACHING UNDERGRADUATE REINFORCED CONCRETE DESIGN Nathan Rumsey, Jonathan Russell and Kassim Tarhini This paper highlights innovative teaching techniques aimed at improving understanding and comprehension of reinforced concrete design theory. These techniques include: 1) Use of American Concrete Institute (ACI) building code-based analysis and design techniques, which focus on strain compatibility and equilibrium concepts; 2) students are required to develop five sets of team-based spreadsheet programming assignments; and 3) incorporation of a term

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 78 Thursday Sessions project requiring students to design, construct, and test full-scale reinforced concrete beams. This course focuses on improving student’s abilities to think critically and apply their knowledge of fundamental engineering principles to solve reinforced concrete design problems. Taught with the same pedagogical techniques for the past ten years, the course regularly earns positive feedback from current students and graduates, and is rated as one the most valuable undergraduate courses taken during their four-year educational program. Session T1D: Introductory Courses I Chair: Teresa Larkin, American University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS - MATHEMATICS PREPARATION FOR A MODERN ENGINEERING PROGRAM Zohra Z. Manseur, Adrian Ieta and Rachid Manseur This work in progress report discusses aspects of the modernization of lower and upper division mathematics courses within an electrical and computer engineering curriculum under development. The justifications for reform are presented and a few initiatives for reform are proposed. Mathematics education in engineering curricula has undergone very little progress within the past century, while the field of engineering and the educational demands of the engineering workforce have changed quite significantly. A new approach to mathematics preparation is needed in improving the mathematics courses already present in the curriculum and in the introduction of new courses in terms of usefulness and relevance to engineering education. WORK IN PROGRESS - IMAGE PROCESSING (AND CATS) AS AN INTRODUCTION TO ALGORITHMIC THINKING Osvaldo Clua and Maria Feldgen An Engineering Workshop is mandatory en the third term of the engineering curricula of a sister institution. In the workshop each major choice is allowed to have a four week introductory mini course. We were asked to develop such a course for Computer Science majors. In order to give our students an early taste of programming and helping the other students with their academic skills, we chose to develop algorithmic thinking contextualized as Image Processing. In the paper we describe the choices we made and how we used Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) to enhance the students experience. We explain how we structured the full course and the grading around the CATs. The course was graded using a performance evaluation over a team project: the enhancement or restoration of an image chosen by the team, with a program also chosen by the team, accompanied with a documented solution of the problem. WORK IN PROGRESS - ASSESSMENT AND PILOT DELIVERY OF AN INTRODUCTION TO INFRASTRUCTURE COURSE Philip J. Parker, Matthew W. Roberts and M. Keith Thompson The infrastructure of the United States is exceeding its design capacity and is aging, requiring maintenance and renovation. In order to meet this challenge, a need exists to produce civil and environmental engineers who have a broad understanding of the pressing needs of the infrastructure of the United States. An “Introduction to Infrastructure” course (“I2I”) has been developed by the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville (UWP) to address this need. The course is intended for sophomore students and serves two main purposes in the curriculum: 1. To introduce the students to civil and environmental engineering and the sub-disciplines, and 2. To begin the development of an awareness of infrastructure and the challenges facing the United States with respect to infrastructure overcapacity and degradation. The focus of this paper is on the process by which the course was developed. Details of efforts to incorporate exemplary teaching materials in the course development will also be presented and the content of the course will be outlined. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the course is that students will be completing a simplified “infrastructure report card” for a local municipality. This simplified report card is modeled after the “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers. WORK IN PROGRESS - IMPROVING PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS VIA DYNAMICALLY WORKED-OUT PROBLEMS Asad Azemi, Roxanne Toto and Thomas Litzinger This paper describes our continued work in creating a set of narrated dynamically worked-out problems for the Electric Circuits students using a Tablet PC. The examples are intended to improve problem-solving skills by enhancing understanding of the key concepts and the way that they should be utilized in solving circuits’ problems. A detailed explanation of how these worked out problems are put together is provided. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approach by a group of students and faculty have been very encouraging.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 79 Thursday Sessions ROLE OF LARGER SOFTWARE ARTIFACTS IN INTRODUCTORY COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES Oleg Krogius, Thomas B. Horton and Mark S. Sherriff This paper compares the effectiveness of two approaches that can be used to teach concepts in introductory courses such as CS1 and CS2 – a conventional lecture-based approach and one using larger software programs (artifacts) with accompanying guided exercises. Our assessment includes measures of students’ self-confidence as well as a measurement of their knowledge of the topics used in this study: inheritance and iterators. Finally, we consider some generalizations that can be made about these treatments and how well they perform. Session T1E: Novel Active Learning for Increased Student Engagement Chair: Bob O'Connell, University of Missouri Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon K WORK IN PROGRESS - THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF USING ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES IN LECTURE-BASED COURSES: EXPERIENCE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Jill Auerbach and Bonnie Ferri Engineering programs across the country promote the success of their courses to engage students through the use of hands-on projects, cooperative learning and other non-traditional educational strategies. While alternative strategies to lecture-based instruction are preferable in many ways, there are formidable obstacles to their widespread implementation. The goal of a project funded by an NSF CCLI grant addresses several of these obstacles through the use of portable, low-cost experiment modules in traditional lecture-based courses to enhance the learning environment. This research describes the introduction of these experiments at a top tier university and the lessons learned about implementing a cohesive program of hands-on experiments in several courses that do not have lab components. The challenges associated with both integrating experiments in long-running lecture-only classes and evaluating the impact on students is examined. The experience of using a quasi-experimental design to more fully understand both the costs and benefits of using portable experiments in a Systems and Controls course is also discussed, which highlights the inherent costs and potential benefits of integrating hands-on experiments in lecture-style courses.

WORK IN PROGRESS - AN INNOVATION MERGING "CLASSROOM FLIP" AND TEAM-BASED LEARNING Chrysanthe Demetry This work in progress compares two versions of a “classroom flip” instructional strategy in which lectures are moved from inside class to outside class. Class time is then spent on problem solving and feedback. In previous offerings of this materials science course, students were asked to read instructor-supplied lecture notes and complete an on-line warmup assignment prior to class. Informal cooperative learning activities such as think-pair-share were used during class, and clickers provided a mechanism for probing understanding and providing feedback. In the most recent offering, students viewed instructor-prepared multimedia microlectures and took an individual quiz as homework, then repeated the quiz and completed a problem set with an assigned team during class. Thus, the redesigned course delivered multimedia rather than text lectures, and utilized a structured team-based learning strategy rather than informal cooperative learning structures. Moreover, higher level “material selection challenges” were added to the redesigned course. This paper summarizes the planned assessment and evaluation methods to compare the two classroom flip models; results and analysis are not yet complete. A STARTER ACTIVITY DESIGN PROCESS TO DEEPEN STUDENT'S UNDERSTANDING OF OUTCOME-RELATED PROJECT LEARNING OBJECTIVES Siegfried Rouvrais, Julien Mallet and Bruno Vinouze Engineering educational programs increasingly rely on project-based learning. Within, it is crucial to early present to students intended learning outcomes from the outset of large projects. However, even if well formulated, many outcome-related project learning objectives are not properly understood by students out of experiences. Thus, some students struggled to identify objectives throughout activities and tended to distance themselves from acquisitions. Short concrete activities could advantageously help student self-recognize learning objectives. For such, we propose a systematic insertion of authentic starter activities in the front-end of large projects, so as to give students a better insight and deeper understanding of the knowledge, skills, and abilities they are expected to acquire. Properly designed starter activities promote enthusiasm, motivation, and increase project involvement. For program developments, this paper proposes a three-phase process, from design to improvement, for integrating starter activities and to favor a coherent treatment throughout a curriculum. This process is based on our six years of experiences with large semester projects.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 80 Thursday Sessions APPLYING A METHODOLOGY BASED ON PERSONAL WELFARE TO THE FINAL YEAR ENGINEERING PROJECT Ferran Badia, Fernando Cores, Gemma Filella, Francesc Gine de Sola, Toni Granollers and Margarita Moltó Engineering curricula include the execution of a Final Year Project (FYP) at the end of the training process. Unfortunately, several studies show that the FYP has a very high non-completion rate. In order to motivate the students to finish their FYP on time, this paper presents an efficient methodology applied to FYP guidance. Our methodology, based on the use of a portfolio, is able to improve the personal welfare of the students, help the students-tutors to plan their periodic meetings and finally to support an outcome-based assessment throughout the process. The proposed methodology was implemented in a web-based tool, over the Sakai virtual campus. In order to compare our methodology with the traditional one, a control group of 40 students and 11 teachers was chosen. The experimental results have shown that a high percentage of students who used the portfolio finished their FYPs within the time envisaged in the curricula plan. Likewise, they obtained higher marks on the majority of evaluated skills and planned their leisure time better. WORK IN PROGRESS - USING INTERACTIVITY VIDEO GAMES FACTORS TO DEFINE ROLE PLAYING GAMES AS A SUPPORTING TOOL FOR LEARNING BY DOING Gilberto Huesca, Julieta Noguez, Luis Neri and Víctor Robledo-Rella Edutainment has emerged as a computational area that combines entertainment and education in order to engage students to learn in creative ways. Role Playing Games (RPG) are a type of games where players take the role of a character within a story and make decisions to advance and reach a given goal. RPG’s are highly interactive entertainment tools that propose complex virtual worlds and rich and interesting story lines. These characteristics could be used to engage students and as vehicles to deliver educational material. Based on this, we have developed a generic architecture for edutainment systems called RchEd. This architecture defines a User Interface component to support multimedia deployment. An Edutainment System component will manage user interactions and the game development. The methodology, edutainment architecture and preliminary results are shown. Session T1F: Courseware Technologies Applications I Chair: Weizhao Zhao, University of Miami Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon E & F THE EFFECT OF SOLICITING DEMOGRAPHIC DATA ON THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS ON ONLINE TESTS Amruth N. Kumar Stereotype threat was studied in the context of online testing in Computer Science. For the study, the student’s identity was made salient by asking the student to identify sex and race, with no additional allusions to positive or negative stereotypes associated with any of their subgroups. It was found that the negative effect of entering demographic data before answering a test was more readily apparent on harder topics. The negative effect of stereotype threat on female and non-Caucasian students was significant among those who had not already mastered the material. On the harder topic in the study, after excluding those who had mastered the material, stereotype threat was found to negatively affect male and Caucasian students also, possibly because of “choking effect”. Given these results, it is recommended that demographic information should be solicited after rather than before online tests. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTELLIGENT PROJECT FAILURE ANALYSIS Song Tan, Kai Qian and Xiang Fu Sophisticated course projects in senior computer science classes have raised great challenges to educators. Students now have stronger needs for instant and individualized guidance when exposed to the complexity of software development. In this paper, we describe the application of Bayesian Network, a probabilistic graphic model, to automated project failure analysis. Students can make multiple project submissions to an automated grader before the project deadline. Each submission will be graded immediately, by running a collection of test cases prepared by instructors in advance. Then failure behaviors of test cases are piped to a Bayesian Network (BN) inference engine. The BN engine generates a report on the most probable failure causes, and helps students in removing software bugs. The analysis of the BN engine can be improved by parameter learning. A case study is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 81 Thursday Sessions DEMO PROGRAM FOR FREQUENCY SAMPLING FIR FILTER DESIGN METHOD Gordana Jovanovic Dolecek Demo programs that illustrate concepts with visual aids have become one of the more important tools in the field of engineering education. They help students learn faster, remember longer, and identify the fundamental concepts better. Demo programs are especially beneficial in terms of saving time and effort for both teaching and learning. To this end a demo program for teaching Frequency Sampling Finite Impulse Response design method is developed. In particular, a frequency sampling design of a differentiator using comb and resonator filters is demonstrated. The program is implemented in MATLAB using tool makeshow, which has several favorable characteristics. It is demonstrated, step by step, how the initial comb characteristic is being changed by introducing the corresponding second order resonators. All the steps are demonstrated in z-plane and in the frequency domain. Finally, all steps are presented together in the same slide and the obtained differentiator characteristic is compared with the desired characteristic. The program can be used as a complement to theoretical classes on the fundamentals of digital signal processing at the graduate level. The student validation of the program is also included. WORK IN PROGRESS - SERIOUS 3D GAME FOR MOBILE NETWORKS PLANNING Andres Navarro, Juan Vicente Pradilla and Patricia Madriñán Serious games is an emerging technology growing in importance for specialized training, taking advantage of 3D games and game engines in order to improve the realistic experience of users. The concept of a serious game combines the concept of computer games used for recreational purposes with specific goals like training specialized personnel and is part of the concept of blended learning. The idea of a serious game for radio planning requires some level of abstraction and a combination between visual designers and engineers in order to maintain accurate concepts about radio and a good “feeling” from the gamer or user side. In this paper we expose the development of a serious game for Telecommunications planning training, which uses open source tools and real data from Digital Terrain Maps. We combine some innovative ideas about propagation models, 3D modeling of digital terrain, game engines and a traditional radio planning tool.

AUDIO CONTENT-BASED FEATURE EXTRACTION ALGORITHMS USING J-DSP FOR ARTS, MEDIA AND ENGINEERING COURSES Mohit Shah, Gordon Wichern, Andreas Spanias and Harvey Thornburg J-DSP is a java-based object-oriented online programming environment developed at Arizona State University for education and research. This paper presents a collection of interactive Java modules for the purpose of introducing undergraduate and graduate students to feature extraction in music and audio signals. These tools enable online simulations of different algorithms that are being used in applications related to content-based audio classification and Music Information Retrieval (MIR). The simulation software is accompanied by a series of computer experiments and exercises that can be used to provide hands-on training. Specific functions that have been developed include modules used widely such as Pitch Detection, Tonality, Harmonicity, Spectral Centroid and the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). This effort is part of a combined research and curriculum program funded by NSF CCLI that aims towards exposing students to advanced multidisciplinary concepts and research in signal processing. Session T1G: Formal and Informal Evaluation and Peer Assessment Chair: Joy Watson, University of South Carolina-Columbia Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - PEER ASSESSMENT OF ASSIGNMENT Badri Basnet, Lyn Brodie and John Worden We have appraised the effectiveness of peer assessment of assignments in aiding student learning at the University of Southern Queensland. Each student was randomly allocated two peers’ assignments for double-blind assessment. A marking rubric was provided. More than 95% of the class participated in the process. Students’ peer-assessment work was evaluated by the instructor. Over 80% of the students assessed their peers satisfactorily. Students' learning experiences, attitudes and behavior towards the peer assessment system was surveyed. More than 60% of the students considered peer assessment a useful learning tool. However 25% remained unconvinced. Most of these students either fully or partially subscribed to William Perry's position of 'dualism'. About 55% found the feedback from their peer's useful. Surprisingly, >69% of the students believed that the peer assessment had nothing to contribute towards a students' community of practice.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 82 Thursday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - PROGRAMMING ASSIGNMENT SUMMARY FOR ANALYSIS, QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT IN CS1 - CS3 Karina Assiter Homework assignments are essential for skills development in a first or second year programming course (CS1 – CS3), and instructors who assign homework in CS1 – CS3 would like submitted solutions to accurately reflect student performance. Unfortunately, this is hard to gage when students increasingly have access to solutions on the internet and are frequently encouraged to collaborate. To address these concerns, we incorporated a summary into the list of programming assignment requirements. Though it serves many roles, including as a vehicle for analysis of course topics, it’s most important role is as qualitative measure of an individual students’ performance (which indirectly informs their quantitative assessment). This paper describes this assignment summary: including its original purpose, example analysis and summary questions, textual analysis of student responses, and preliminary correlations between responses and student assignment scores. SUPPORTING EXAM REVISION VIA GOOGLE TALK AND EXAMOPEDIA WIKI Manish Malik This work highlights the benefits of tapping into one of many informal learning activities in which students engage, namely use of past papers for exam revision. Exams can be both stressful and isolating for students. This paper presents a novel approach to exam revision via a ‘wiki’ and ‘Google talk’ which the author calls ‘Examopedia’. This approach benefits both from cooperative and constructivist learning. We show how students form an online community of practice around this informal learning activity providing peer-support for each other. It is well known that peer interactions, online or face to face, can encourage deep learning. Using Examopedia, students can prepare together for an exam. When using Examopedia on their own, students found conflicting answers a problem. However, the tutor used Examopedia with the students to give them timely guidance. Examopedia gives a new opportunity to facilitate revision through timely formative feedback and guidance. It also allows ‘Just in time’ teaching where needed. We find Examopedia to be a blend of teacher and student centric learning activities. We present analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data collected for two groups of students (N=38 and N=58) at Level M and Level 1 of their engineering degree.

EVOLUTION OF A DIGITAL PAPER EXAM GRADING SYSTEM Aaron Bloomfield We describe the evolution of a system designed to allow digital grading, by a human, of traditional paper-based exams or homework assignments. We present a number of new features that build upon the system described in a paper previously published in ITiCSE 2008 [1]. In particular, our system now has the ability to monitor an enormous range of data, from individual question scores, to variances for the same questions across different graders, to question and exam statistics from one semester to the next. The system boasts a number of benefits over paper based grading. Overall grading time is reduced – small courses will see a modest improvement, while large courses can see their grading time cut in half due to the automation of many of the tasks: flipping to the correct page, summing up the pages, recording the grades, returning the exams, etc. Rapid grading of exams can also aid students in a better understanding of the material, as the exam questions are still fresh in their minds when the tests are returned. Simultaneous grading across multiple locations is possible, as there is no single paper copy to hand off to the next grader. Permanent digital records are kept of the exams, allowing for viewing of exams at a later date. A PRE-POST TOPIC ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR UNCOVERING MISCONCEPTIONS AND ASSESSING THEIR REPAIR AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGE Jacquelyn Kelly, Stephen Krause and Dale Baker Misconceptions act as barriers to conceptual change, but uncovering and repairing them requires considerable effort. Thus, the research question is, "How effective is a simple pre-post topic assessment tool in uncovering misconceptions and assessing their repair and student conceptual change?" A multimodal pre-and-post topic assessment tool was created to identify misconceptions and assess their repair and student conceptual change. Pre-post assessments were created for six course topics for an introductory materials class. Assessments were composed of four to six describe-and-sketch questions given before and after a topic. Data showed incoming students are familiar with written descriptions (possibly memorized) of covalent, ionic, and metallic bonding, but not van der Waals bonding. Conceptual understanding was much less when models were sketched, indicating conceptual knowledge that was shallower than written descriptions indicated. Gains were always less for sketched than written models, indicative of greater difficulty of conceptual change and building detailed bonding mental models. Visuals, misconceptions, conceptual change and learning are presented in full detail in the paper body.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 83 Thursday Sessions Session T1H: Practices in Continuous Improvement of Programs Chair: Richard A. Layton, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon H ECAT: AN ELECTRONIC DATA ANALYSIS TOOL FOR ABET DISPLAY MATERIALS Deborah A. Trytten ABET, Inc. requires that display materials, including syllabuses, assignments and examples of student work, be collected the year before an accreditation site visit. The Exhibit Collection and Analysis Tool (ECAT) was created to electronically store and organize display materials for our program in a manner that was useful for ABET program evaluators. ECAT was designed as a simple, maintainable, structured search engine. The ABET program evaluator who visited our institution repeatedly praised ECAT at length. ECAT was used to count the number of occurrences of assignments that support each of the eleven ABET program outcomes, resulting in a novel metric to support outcomes assessment. ECAT could be extended to include classifications in Bloom’s taxonomy, to check program depth in addition to breadth. Future uses for ECAT include building an electronic portfolio for our program, similar to the e-portfolios that some engineering programs build for outcomes assessment. EXPLAINING EDUCATION TO ENGINEERS: FEEDBACK CONTROL THEORY AS A METAPHOR Alan R. Cheville and Euan D. Lindsay One of the barriers for engaging engineering faculty in the scholarship of learning and teaching is the challenge of learning a new vocabulary. Becoming fluent in engineering education requires the acquisition of new concepts and ideas that are often expressed in unfamiliar terms. Feedback control is a technical field common to a range of engineering disciplines that can be used as a model to help bridge the conceptual gap between traditional engineering and engineering education. Many of the key elements of engineering education can be represented by the elements of a feedback control system, with their behaviour in a learning environment paralleling their behaviour in a process control context. The feedback control model can be used to explain: the importance of timely feedback to students, the significance of assessment and evaluation in the learning process, the impact of learning styles upon learning outcomes, and the need for student-centered teaching approaches. While both fields have complexities that cannot be captured by simple models, the basic ideas can be explained simply. Feedback control metaphors make the basics accessible to a wider audience of engineering faculty.

DIRECT ASSESSMENT OF ENGINEERING PROGRAMS AT THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK Heather A. Harvey, Margaret A. Krudysz and Ardie D. Walser Assessment of student performance beyond exam grades and grade point averages is essential to the continuous improvement of engineering education. Detailed assessment results allow faculty to easily determine which program areas need improvement and which are successfully achieving educational objectives and course outcomes. Direct assessment is the most effective method of evaluating student performance as it involves direct examination or observation of specific student knowledge. Evaluation of “soft” outcomes is challenging and often inadequate. Direct assessment procedures were adopted by engineering programs at the City College of New York in preparation for a 2010 re-accreditation visit by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The four programs presented in this paper used similar direct assessment processes based on development of performance criteria and rubrics to assess outcomes. Some of the unique aspects of the various assessment methods include: weighting courses based on their contribution to a particular performance criterion; modifying department-wide rubrics in response to the needs of individual courses; and reviewing the instructor’s assessment by a faculty panel to ensure objectivity. This paper discusses the challenges outcomes assessment poses for engineering programs. CURRICULUM REDESIGN: CONCURRENTLY ADDRESSING CONTENT MASTERY AND DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE ABILITIES Debra A. Fowler, Jeff E. Froyd and Jean E. L. Layne Design or redesign of undergraduate engineering curricula is a complex process. Curriculum redesign addresses both development of content mastery as well as development of cognitive abilities that are common across engineering disciplines. Concurrently addressing learning outcomes in both cognitive ability and content mastery presents a substantial challenge for faculty curriculum committees. This paper outlines a process and offers tools to facilitate curriculum redesign for student learning.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 84 Thursday Sessions PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT WORK IN PROGRESS: VALUE STREAM MAPPING THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS OUTCOMES Carrie Steinlicht, Andrew Neary, Tyler LeBrun, Klint Sauke, Cody Sundermann and Jeff Weber This paper describes how the Manufacturing Engineering Technology (MNET) Program at South Dakota State University (SDSU) is using Lean Production techniques to map the educational outcomes across the curriculum. As a part of the accreditation review process, the MNET program has undertaken a project to determine whether the outcomes used in the program provide value to the constituents. A student research team has been assembled to value stream map the MNET program educational process. The needs of the customer, or educational outcomes that provide value, were determined through surveys and interviews with constituents of the program. A future state map will be developed and compared to a current state value stream map. Using the information gleaned from these maps, the curriculum can be critically evaluated and changed to better meet the needs of its constituents. Session T1J: Learning Through Experience Chair: Michele Miller, Michigan Technological University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon J WORK IN PROGRESS - PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IN MANUFACTURING PROCESS Ziliang Zhou and Anthony Donaldson A project-based learning (PBL) is implemented in the teaching of a manufacturing process course at the undergraduate level to focus on reducing the gap between what’s been taught in the classroom and what’s been practiced on the manufacturing floor. Instead of the traditional lecture/homework/exam approach, each student is asked to complete a semester long project in the areas of manufacturing processes and manufacturing materials. Surveys are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. It is expected that the implementation of PBL approach will more fully utilize the instructor’s years of manufacturing experience and bring real manufacturing practices to the classroom. It is also expected that the students, upon completion of the course, will be more ready to take on a career in manufacturing and start to perform on day one. The overall effectiveness of this approach will also be evaluated by company supervisors on student interns who have taken the course versus those who have not.

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AND COMPLEX PROBLEM SOLVING: UNDERSTANDING AND TRANSLATING SUCH EXPERIENCES TO THE CLASSROOM Anna Zilberberg, Olga Pierrakos and Erin Thompson There has been much criticism about undergraduate engineering education not focusing on authentic real-world contexts which are most often associated to ill-structured domains. Undergraduate research experience is one context which provides a strong basis for our students to learn essential problem solving skills. Yet, although such experiences enable engineering students to begin the practice of solving complex problems in authentic contexts, there is a lack of understanding of the nature of these research projects. To fill this gap, we conducted in-depth interviews with students and utilized qualitative data analytic methods in tandem with the Problem-based Learning theory to classify research projects. Initial findings indicate that the research projects tend to be highly complex, moderately structured, and very different from the course-based projects. These findings are important for educators looking to incorporate research-based PBL projects into the classroom. SUMMER INNOVATION EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATES IN SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY Santosh Kurinec, Sean Rommel, Dale Ewbank and Karl Hirschman The President of Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. William Destler announced in 2007 renewed emphasis on innovation and creativity in engineering education from the beginning in undergraduate and graduate education. The Microelectronic Engineering program at RIT proposed to establish a program – Summer Innovation Experience which will allow undergraduate students to participate in innovative research projects during the first and the fourth summer quarter. The program is tailored to first year students, fourth year students seeking graduate school, and students from other disciplines taking the Minor program in Microelectronics and Nanofabrication. Students work under the supervision of a faculty and team up with graduate students. The program is offered during the summer the quarter (June – August) funded through Research Experience for Undergraduates supplements on ongoing projects and industry support. Students are required to present at the institute wide Undergraduate Research Symposium held at RIT each year during the second week of August.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 85 Thursday Sessions A BDI-BASED INTELLIGENT TUTORING MODULE FOR THE E-LEARNING PLATFORM INES Fernando A. Mikic-Fonte, Juan Carlos Burguillo-Rial, Martín Llamas-Nistal and David Fernández-Hermida INES (INtelligent Educational System) is an operative prototype of an e-learning platform, which counts with functionalities of Learning Management Systems, Learning Content Management Systems, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems. To achieve these functionalities, our system includes several tools and technologies, such as: i) semantic management of users and contents; ii) an conversational agent to communicate with students in natural language; iii) BDI-based (Believes, Desires, Intentions) agents, which shape the tutoring module of the system; iv) an inference engine; and v) ontologies, to semantically model the users, their activities, and the learning contents. At the present paper we will address the intelligent tutoring module, and more specifically, its BDI-based agents. Briefly, the tasks of these agents are to recognize each student (checking his/her system credentials) and to obtain information about his/her learning progress. So, it can be able to suggest to each one specific tasks to achieve his/her particular learning objectives. The student himself/herself will decide if he/she accepts these tasks or ask for other ones. These new requested tasks can be delivered or not by the intelligent tutoring module, taking into account its decisions, which are based in several parameters related to the existing learning paths and the student’s profile. WORK IN PROGRESS - PHENOMENOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS' WAYS OF EXPERIENCING HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN Carla B. Zoltowski, William C Oakes and Monica E Cardella Human-centered approaches to design contribute to innovations in engineering design and have been shown to increase productivity, improve quality, reduce errors, improve acceptance of new products, and reduce development costs. Understanding the ways in which students understand and experience human-centered design is needed to create effective design learning experiences to develop the skills needed for human-centered design. To address that need, we are conducting a phenomenographic study of students’ ways of experiencing human-centered design within the context of “designing for others”. Thirty-three student designers from a variety of academic contexts were interviewed using a semi-structured, open-ended approach in which they discussed concrete experiences designing for a customer or client, and reflections and meanings associated with those experiences. Analysis of the data yielded seven qualitatively different ways in which the students experienced human-centered design, or categories of description. The seven categories of description are logically related and comprise the outcome space. A description of the categories, their differences, and hierarchical relationship will be presented. Session T2A: Mini Workshop – Real World Engineering Projects: Discovery-Based Curriculum Modules for First-Year Students Chair: Joan Carletta, The University of Akron Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon A MINI WORKSHOP – REAL WORLD ENGINEERING PROJECTS: DISCOVERY-BASED CURRICULUM MODULES FOR FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS Joan Carletta, Pamela Bhatti, Tom Hartley, Yanfei Liu, Andrea Mitofsky, James A. Smith, Loren Wyard-Scott and Alfred Yu This mini workshop is organized to provide an interactive forum for the introduction a set of six new curriculum modules developed under IEEE’s Real World Engineering Projects (RWEP) program. The modules, which are representative of a larger collection of curriculum modules available to the public via an open-access RWEP web portal, are designed for use in the first-year engineering and computer science classroom, and are hands-on, team-based projects that emphasize the societal impact of the work that engineers do. After a brief introduction to the RWEP program and the six showcased curriculum modules, the authors of the modules will present their ideas and demonstrate the laboratory activities associated with their modules in interactive, informal simultaneous sessions. Session T2B: Panel - Implementing CS Curricula in Secondary Education: An International Perspective Chair: Jan Vahrenhold, Technische Universität Dortmund Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon B PANEL - IMPLEMENTING CS CURRICULA IN SECONDARY EDUCATION: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Tim Bell, Arno Pasternak, Chris Stephenson, Allen Tucker and Jan Vahrenhold Despite several well-received designs for Computer Science curricula in secondary education being published both

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 86 Thursday Sessions on national and international level, the implementation of these curricula is still being impeded by a variety of factors. This panel is intended to present issues, and approaches to solving them, from an international perspective. The presenters bring together experience in curriculum design, implementation, and teacher training and certification, and have had some successes that will help to inform those who are struggling with barriers to successful implementation and sustained improvement to Computer Science education. Given the current efforts to standardize courses in secondary education both in North America and Europe, it is expected that the results of the discussion following the presentations will help inform and influence these implementation efforts. Session T2C: Distance Learning Chair: Edward J. Berger, University of Virginia Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - MAXIMIZING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN A LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Julie M. Little-Wiles, Stephen P. Hundley and Adrie Koehler Use of online learning management systems in higher education is rapidly increasing. Varying methods of establishing and applying the learning management systems can be found among institutions. What content makes a successful online learning environment for students? What can institutions do to better impact student engagement in these systems? And what types of tools do students really desire in these systems? These questions are directing a research study to determine critical elements necessary for students to embrace a learning management system. The goal of our project is to guide administrators and faculty in developing an online learning environment that will enhance and promote student engagement. How best to facilitate a learning environment to support a “sense of community” will also be explored. There are several steps to be performed in our project and this work-in-progress paper will outline those steps and our progress to date.

WORK IN PROGRESS - LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ACCEPTANCES OF INSTRUCTORS FROM VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS: EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION Sevgi Ozkan and Duygu Findik Development of a learning management system requires a multidisciplinary approach and comparison of instructors’ adoption in different departments towards system use is one of the most important targets to be considered. The purpose of this study is to identify the salient factors related with the instructors’ adoption of learning management system and to reveal the differences between Engineering and Arts and Science and Education instructors’ intention towards the use of system. The result of this study will help researchers; in the context of whether they should consider the departmental differences or not when developing, implementing and providing continuous improvement for learning management systems.

WORK IN PROGRESS – TRANSITIONING AN ESTABLISHED ENGINEERING DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAM INFRASTRUCTURE TO AN ON-LINE INSTRUCTIONAL SETTING James F. Groves, Sharon A. Caraballo, Rosalyn S. Hobson, Glenda R. Scales and Linda Vahala For over 25 years the Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Program consortium has used distance learning technologies to deliver courses to qualified working professionals and on-campus graduate students. In recent years, the program’s courses have been delivered using interactive video conferencing, a solution that has proven to be increasingly limiting. This paper will highlight the motivations for moving the primary delivery mode of the program to on-line delivery of courses to the computer desktop. It will also summarize key points of discussion from a June 2009 workshop held to introduce faculty to key pedagogical elements of online instruction. Discussions at the workshop highlighted how recent developments in information technology have made the delivery of substantive, interactive online courses feasible. Given that engineering faculty are most familiar with traditional classroom-based instruction and learning, the workshop sought to raise faculty awareness about how equally effective pedagogy can be accomplished in an online instructional environment, using appropriate technology in teaching solutions. Particularly, the workshop sought to convey to those in attendance that effective engineering pedagogy can occur in an online instructional environment. WORK IN PROGRESS: IDENTIFYING ADEQUATE LEVEL OF INSTRUCTION WITHOUT HINDERING DEEPER LEARNING IN DISTANCE LEARNING Anastasia Trekles and Shoji Nakayama At what point do instruction, online guidance, tutorials, and lecture notes lead students toward their learning goals too much? Many educators, especially those who teach at a distance, often have questions as to how much information is enough. In designing learning activities, are we directing students to just the information they need to earn a grade or

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 87 Thursday Sessions complete an assignment, sabotaging their motivation to learn more deeply and develop better critical thinking skills about a subject? This paper will investigate these concerns both through review of current literature of instructional design, distance learning, direct instruction, and constructivist teaching strategies, as well as through research conducted in an undergraduate Organizational Leadership and Supervision (OLS) online course taught at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Indiana, United States. SELECTION AND SEQUENCING CONSTRAINTS FOR PERSONALIZED COURSES Andrea Sterbini and Marco Temperini Adaptive e-learning systems allow to define learning paths (courses) as personalized sequences of learning objects (l.objects), and maintain/change such sequences, throughout course taking, according to changes occurring in the learner's model. On-line courses are easier to study, once they are suited to learner's own learning needs (knowledge_aims / learning_styles) and other personal traits or preferences (such as those determining the available study-time and pace). Curriculum Sequencing, i.e. various techniques to build the above sequences, is then a fundamental research area in the field of adaptive e-learning. In this paper we show the enrichment of a web based adaptive e-learning system (Lecomps), with a suite of sequencing techniques, in such a way that they can be summoned by teachers and/or learners in order to bend the course construction process, according to certain constraints. Starting from the same learner model, i.e. Starting Knowledge (SK) and Learning Style, plus other preferences, the use of different (combinations of) techniques, produces different learning sequences and can both accomplish teacher's pedagogical statements and suite learner's personal preferences. Lecomps produces course through two phases: first selecting (from a Repository) l.objects apt to fill the knowledge gap between learner's SK and the course's target knowledge, then topologically sorting the selected_l.objects graph to present the student with a linear path. Different techniques are used to optimize the sequence. During selection phase, the sequence can be tuned wrt the different acceptable_workload scenarios: e.g. a full-time student might prefer a "compact" course (with minimum total effort), while a worker might like an "easy" course (longer, with upper_bounded effort of l.objects); moreover a "minimum knowledge" course could be preferred (with minimal acquired knowledge) or rather a "smooth" course (with std_dev of the l.objects efforts minimum). During linearization then, pedagogical directions and personal preferences can be accommodated, such as teaching/learning style and learner's ability to remind and use concepts. An aspect taken care here is the overall effort of each lesson (subset of the sequence) composing the course (it may be made according to learner's study time statements). Another measure applied is the "learning objective (LO) span": a LO specifies knowledge aspects of the l.objects; once a l.objects L1 (introduces and) lets acquire a LO, which is required by another l.objects L2, the span of that LO is the distance between L1 and L2 in the repository graph. Such LO span captures the memory effort of studying L2 some time after L1. Bounding the overall LOs span of the course, the required learner's effort is constrained. Another metrics measures the relative depth of each couples of subsequent l.objects of the path: if usually L2, following L1 in the path, is deeper than L1 in the repository graph, we are building a course that lets deepen topics before passing to unrelated topics, pursuing a depth-first-fashion visit of the graph. Instead, if L2 is usually less deep than L1, the course is more likely to conduct a breadth-fist-fashion visit of the repository graph. Deepening or broadening the learning activity correspond to different pedagogical teacher's choices. Session T2D: Service Learning Chair: Daniel M. Ferguson, Purdue University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS - ASSESSING ENGINEERING SERVICE STUDENTS' CHARACTERISTICS Adam R. Carberry Engineering service opportunities are becoming more the norm than exceptions as today’s engineering curricula evolve. Research is needed to explain why so many engineering students desire service opportunities as part of their engineering education. The goal of the following work in progress is to characterize the students who are currently participating in some form of engineering learning-through-service in order to identify underlying reasons for being drawn to service. Using an array of surveying instruments, a multi-institutional assessment of student perceptions of service as a learning source, engineering epistemological beliefs, personality traits, and self-concepts – self-efficacy, motivation, outcome expectancy, and anxiety– toward engineering design is currently underway. To date what has been learned is that most service students 1) perceive service as heavily impacting their learning of professional and technical skills, 2) have slightly sophisticated engineering epistemological beliefs, 3) are typically outgoing, agreeable, and open-minded, 4) have high self-efficacy, motivation, and expectancy for success toward engineering design, and 5) have relatively low anxiety toward engineering design.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 88 Thursday Sessions SERVICE LEARNING AND VIRTUAL WORLDS Bruce R Maxim, Matthew D. Sable and John Crisitano This project leverages virtual world environments to create spaces to support sustainable problem solving communities. These communities are seeking to address pressing social problems through the collaborative efforts of college students, high school students, volunteers, and staff members affiliated with the Gleaners Incorporated. Our approach is to have engineering students build a Second Life environment that provides a structure for collaborative problem solving activities. Second Life serves as a vehicle to build a stronger sense of community among food bank network members, to help conceptualize parameters of their problems, develop virtual solutions collaboratively, test these solutions, and implement these solutions in the real world. In order to involve high school age students, engineering students are using the Torque Game Engine to build virtual environments to support instructional activities focusing on nutrition and economical shopping. Initial student survey data indicates satisfaction with the service learning experience. DESIGNING FOR THE DISABLED IN THE ENGINEERING CLASSROOM Laura Stanley, Lenore Page and Carolyn Plumb Service learning in the classroom has been shown to provide great benefit to students and their communities. During the fall of 2009, a national design competition for the disabled was integrated as a service learning term project in Montana State University’s Industrial Engineering Department course entitled “Ergonomics and Safety Engineering I.” This project provided students with hands-on experience in applying both their hard and soft skills (based upon the ABET a-k outcomes) in designing for special populations. Students used the concepts learned throughout the course in order to develop an assistive device that would empower people with disabilities to overcome barriers to employment. Each student group was assigned a person with a disability and a vocational aid. The students designed assistive devices that enabled the workers to perform their jobs with greater ease and efficiency and in some cases with complete independence. In order to encourage a more widespread adoption of service learning within engineering, this paper provides one application of a service learning project that can be applied across a variety of engineering domains. WORK IN PROGRESS - USING PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH TO INVESTIGATE STUDENT LEARNING IN ENGINEERS WITHOUT BORDERS Laura Hahn and Valeri Werpetinski This paper provides preliminary information about the use of participatory action research (PAR) in an investigation of what and how students learn in Engineers Without Borders (EWB). PAR is a methodology based on participants’ roles in setting the agenda, involvement in data collection and analysis/interpretation, and control over the use of outcomes. Key features of PAR include collaboration between researchers and participants to study and transform an organization, incorporation of participants’ local knowledge of the organization, and social action based on research findings. Engaging students in PAR to better understand their own learning and practices in international engineering service projects—in an effort to improve those practices and the broader curriculum—is an innovative approach to engineering education. This paper describes this methodology and discusses its implementation in an early phase of the project: collecting data about EWB students’ experiences on-site in Guatemala and in Cameroon.

ENGINEERING SERVICE LEARNING, ENGINEERING ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ASSESSMENT: BUILDING A PROGRAM THAT WORKS Lisa Zidek The U.A. Whitaker School of Engineering at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) welcomed its first group of students in 2005, successfully graduating the first class in 2009. A key component to the engineering program includes a two course sequence in Engineering Service Learning and Engineering Entrepreneurship. Engineering Service Learning focuses on identifying a community based need, design criteria and constraints and developing alternative solutions. Engineering Entrepreneurship continues with the engineering design process, emphasizing testing and implementation of the design while developing a business plan and gaining an understanding of the market potential for the solution. Every class in the engineering program is tied directly to targeted assessment outcomes. Engineering Entrepreneurship and Engineering Service Learning support ABET program outcomes d (ability to function on a team) and g (communicate effectively in an interdisciplinary environment), as well as two school specific outcomes l (understand entrepreneurship and business plans) and m (define a community problems and deliver a solution). Outcomes d and g are challenging to assess and are often left to capstone design courses. This paper will provide background on the design and development of the two course series, assessment results from the past two years and changes made based on the assessment results.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 89 Thursday Sessions Session T2E: Engaging and Effective K-12 Outreach Activities Chair: Rose N. Scripa, University of Alabama at Birmingham Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon K WORK IN PROGRESS - INTRODUCING MODERN OPTICS AND PHOTONICS ENGINEERING IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM: AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE Bernardo Andres Leon de la Barra and Karen L. Wilson This paper describes preliminary results in the development and implementation of a new inquiry- and standards-based optics unit for a grade 3/4 composite class at an elementary school in Hobart, the capital city of the state of Tasmania, Australia. This new unit is being developed in close cooperation between an experienced elementary classroom teacher and an engineering lecturer who is actively involved in a number of K-12 collaborative partnerships that seek to excite students about their learning experiences in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. As part of the 2010 delivery of the new optics unit, the research team has explored elementary students’ perceptions of science, scientists and technology by using the Draw-a-Scientist-Test (DAST). Later this year, the Draw-an-Engineer-Test (DAET) will also be administered. The conference presentation will include the results of applying the DAST before and after the delivery of the new optics unit. It will also describe the hands-on activities and teaching resources developed through this partnership, and provide a reflective account on how such a partnership provided students with rewarding learning experiences in modern Optics and Photonics Engineering. The work to be presented at the conference will not only appeal to those with an interest in how some key central ideas in Optics/Photonics Engineering can be introduced at mid-elementary level but to anyone who is interested in productively engaging with schools and teachers with a focus on the STEM fields. ENGINEERING EDUCATION OUTREACH IN CHINESE SOCIAL CONTEXT: AN ETHNOGRAPHICAL STUDY ON IEEE-TISP IMPLEMENTATION WITH RURAL SCHOOLS IN HONG KONG Kai-Pan Mark, Ho-Man Tsang and Yuen-Yan Chan Engineering education outreach at pre-university level has become a recent focus of engineering education. Some initiatives, such as IEEE’s Teacher-In-Service Programme (TISP), have been offered by professional organizations to support engineering education outreach for pre-university sectors by professional engineer volunteers. The support being offered consists of a variety of forms, e.g., web-based teaching plans, on-campus support for teachers and on-campus experiment sessions. The resourceful support by professional organizations may be appropriate in the urban area but in fact needs much adaptation and customization in the less privileged rural schools. One issue is to address the cultural differences between the city and rural contexts. While the city schools favor professionalism when promoting the outreach programmes, the rural schools emphasize more on trust and social networks with the local community to foster initial acceptance and whole-community support to the programme. We adopt an ethnography approach to investigate the implementation of IEEE TISP in two rural small schools in the Frontier Closed Area (FCA) along the Hong Kong and Mainland China boundary. Our experience provides a set of best practices for those who plan about engineering education outreach programmes in a rural community especially in China.

WORK IN PROGRESS - REINVENTING THE ENGINEERING: A HIGH SCHOOL EXTRACURRICULAR PROGRAM DESIGNED TO CONQUER NEW ENGINEERING STUDENTS CANDIDATES Vicente Ferreira de Lucena Jr, Juliana Mesquita Vidal Martinez de Lucena and José Pinheiro de Queiroz Neto This project was developed aiming at increasing the number of student candidates for undergraduate courses in the field of Engineering. In Brazil and particularly in the Amazon region, official numbers point to a big deficit on the necessary quantity of new engineers in order to fulfill the actual demand of new job positions in the industry. This should be achieved with the use of new teaching methodologies on the basic sciences for high school students of the public schools in Manaus, Amazon’s capital. High school students are invited to attend to workshops and practical laboratory classes, in two University campuses in Manaus, on the subjects of Mathematics, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The workshops shall develop their creativity and give them motivation to learn more complex topics related to those subjects. The lab practical classes are planned to show the students the interface between different subjects and its practical application in the engineering world. This should show the students the relevance and applicability of what they learn in the school as the basis for real problems solutions. Moreover, the chosen science topics of each subject are related to specific engineering topics.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 90 Thursday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - COMBINING SERVICE LEARNING WITH THE NSF RESEARCH EXPERIENCES FOR TEACHERS PROGRAM Allen H. Hoffman, Jared R. Quinn, Veronica Tate, Beth Singer and Kristen L. Billiar The WPI NSF Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Program involves middle school teachers in authentic design activities that can be translated to the classroom. Middle school teachers often lack design experience, but are now being required to teach the engineering design process. This pilot study used a service learning project to provide two middle school teachers with hands-on experience implementing the formal engineering design process. The project focused on developing, constructing and evaluating an assistive device to be used in a residential facility for children and young adults with complex medical needs. The teachers designed and built an extendable reaching device with a switch-activated electromagnet that could be used to pick up game pieces and educational cards. The teachers continue to use the engineering design process in their daily classroom activities, and the impact of the RET program will be followed for the next two years. This project demonstrates that service learning design projects can meet the objectives of the RET program and simultaneously deliver useful devices to an underserved population. Additional teachers will participate in a similar activity in 2010. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTEGRATING SEMICONDUCTOR AND NANOTECHNOLOGY FUNDAMENTALS INTO A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE CURRICULUM MODULE Michael A. Jackson, Elaine Lewis, Daniel Fullerton, Santosh Kurinec and Sean Rommel The Microelectronic Engineering Faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology have been engaged in two day K-12 Teacher forums addressing the engineering and fabrication of semiconductor devices for 12 years. A common theme that has emerged is the difficulty teachers have introducing new topics, such as those presented at the above-mentioned forums, to their students. It has become apparent to the Microelectronic Engineering faculty that a pre-developed curriculum requiring only teacher training would have the best chance of making a major impact. This paper reports on work in progress on a five week module designed to introduce semiconductor and nanotechnology fundamentals to AP physics students during the time after their AP exam in May and graduation in June. A major benefit of such a program would be introducing STEM students to exciting career opportunities. Session T2F: Innovation in the Classroom I Chair: Gordana Jovanovic Dolecek, Institute INAOE Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon E & F WORK IN PROGRESS - OUTSOURCING THE LECTURING IN AN ENGINEERING PHYSICS CLASS Kenneth S. Manning The struggle to get students to attempt- and complete- assigned homework problems may well be eternal. Many professors have tried different ways to encourage students to get the vital practice that homework offers. This paper details the experience of making group work on the homework the focus of class time, and having the lecturing done by using the "Physics I: Classical Mechanics" lectures available through MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative. Students were expected to watch the videos on their own time- making this their "homework" while we would discuss and complete most of the assigned problems in class. Discussed are the benefits and drawbacks of doing this, including student comments. INTEGRATING ENGINEERING AND BIOLOGY FOR BIO-NANOTECHNOLOGY CURRICULUM Waseem Asghar, Priyanka P. Ramachandran and Samir M Iqbal The applications of nanotechnology in biology and medicine have seen unprecedented growth. Nano-research encompasses many areas of science and engineering. This paper reports the development of innovative methods and approaches to teach Bio-Nanotechnology, with similar relevance for biologists and engineers. The course work is approached from an engineering perspective offering insights on the details of nano-scale fabrication processes as well as cell biology. The basics of biology and chemistry, with focus on how to engineer the behavior of molecules at the nano-scale, are also introduced and analyzed. The course is designed so as to (1) focus on broad accessibility (for students from engineering and natural sciences), (2) build design-problems of interest that cross the traditional boundaries, (3) accelerate assimilation of new knowledge spanning multiple domains through individual and construct-centered design problems, and (4) effectively exchange knowledge of state of the art developments and capabilities using collaborative learning projects. WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES IN AGENT-BASED MODELING Marcia R. Friesen, Marek Laskowski, Bryan Demianyk and Robert D. McLeod This paper outlines opportunities for student work in agent-based modeling, with reference to applications to community-level epidemic modeling, modeling patient waiting times in a hospital emergency departments, and

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 91 Thursday Sessions modeling the spread of infection within a hospital. The applications demonstrate the educational opportunities inherent in agent-based modeling, which can address the educational and professional context calling graduate engineers to have a wider range of professional skills, including communication, teamwork, self-management, creativity, and awareness. Agent-based modeling applications lend themselves naturally to interdisciplinary exposure and professional skill development. Agent-based modeling is also supported by concepts in teaching and learning theory. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTEGRATE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS INTO CS CURRICULUM WITH LABS-IN-A-BOX COURSEWARE Kai Qian, Chia-Tien Dan Lo and XiaoLin Hu Embedded systems are widely used everywhere and play especially important roles in smart green computing application nowadays. The rapid growth of embedded systems results in a shortage of professionals for embedded software development. How to meet this urgent need is a challenge. To support embedded system education, we have developed a portable and reusable embedded software labware with hands-on labs in a relatively inexpensive box. The developed labware especially targets on schools that face budget deficiencies for embedded lab equipments and lack dedicated instructors whose expertise is in the embedded system area. The portable and inexpensive real hands-on labs and the modular and flexible design of this work provide a “ready-to-adopt” courseware for these schools. WORK IN PROGRESS - PORTABLE STUDENT LABS IMPLEMENTATION Patrick Seeling While experiential learning through hands-on laboratory units can improve student learning outcomes, traditionally the provisioning and maintenance of dedicated computer laboratories is a costly and time-intensive undertaking. Virtualization can alleviate some of the associated problems, especially when the lab units under consideration are software-based. While virtualization has attracted a great deal of research and implementations to date, some its potential benefits are not utilized when institutions have to provide and maintain fully virtualized environments. In this paper, we introduce Portable Student Labs (PSLabs) based on the QEMU virtualization environment. PSLabs are fully portable virtualized environments that students obtain and afterwards execute either in common computing facilities available on-campus or on their individual computing equipment, thus eliminating the need for dedicated (lab-specific) computing hardware or virtual environments. In addition to the general functionality, we describe typical considerations for the process of creating the PSLabs and its delivery to students. Session T2G: Instrument Development Chair: Lisa Getzler-Linn, Lehigh University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - REFINING A TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RUBRIC FOR FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING INSTRUCTORS Amber Kemppainen, Susan Amato-Henderson and Gretchen Hein At Michigan Technological University, we offer approximately 23 sections of first-year engineering courses (ENG1001, ENG1101, and ENG1102) every fall semester. For course assessment and accreditation reporting, it is important to have a reliable metric of student performance. Perhaps even more important is for this metric to produce comparable results when used by different instructors. The authors began by reviewing the reliability of a rubric developed by Washington State University. For our courses, this rubric was not applicable for all assignments and not reliable between instructors teaching different sections of the same course. Therefore, the rubric was modified to reduce inconsistencies in grading between different instructors and standardize it so that the same rubric could be used for first-year engineering technical communication assignments. This paper focuses on the process of adapting and evaluating a technical communication rubric for use with multiple instructors and assignments. Our process for developing, refining and using a common rubric will be discussed as well as the challenges encountered and the modifications required making it an effective tool for course assessment. INTERNATIONAL DIVERSITY IN GRADUATE ENGINEERING EDUCATION: DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTI INSTITUTIONAL SURVEY Erin Crede and Maura Borrego This study examines the experiences of one of engineering graduate schools largest populations: international students. This paper discusses the use of ethnographically guided observations and interviews in the development of a multi institution survey on graduate student experiences. The results of qualitative analysis will be briefly discussed to contextualize the survey sections and creation of individual questions. The development of this survey was the

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 92 Thursday Sessions second part of a multi phase mixed methods study whose purpose was to investigate the role of international diversity in graduate engineering communities. Results of this study will help shape the future of graduate engineering education by bringing the experiences of both international and domestic graduate engineering students to the forefront. We conclude with implications for the current state of engineering graduate education as well as directions for future research. PITTSBURGH ENGINEERING ATTITUDES SCALE - REVISED: EVIDENCE FOR AN IMPROVED INSTRUMENT Jonathan C. Hilpert, Glenda Stump and Jenefer Husman In the current study, we present data from the administration of our third and final version of the PEAS-R instrument as well as a final set of items. We administered the scale to 980 engineering students in conjunction with established measures of student motivation and strategic learning. An item analysis and a principle axis analysis with an oblimin rotation indicated student responses to the items were internally reliable and structurally valid. A confirmatory factor analysis, a more rigorous test of structural validity, also produced useful results. Finally, a correlational analysis between parceled items from the revised scale and established motivational measures provided evidence of concurrent validity. WORK IN PROGRESS - MEASURING CROSS-DISCIPLINARY TEAM LEARNING IN UNDERGRADUATE PROJECT TEAMS Scott P. Schaffer, Xiaojun Chen and William C. Oakes This work-in-progress study reports current research on a project funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of the project is to develop and validate measures of cross-disciplinary learning in undergraduate project teams. The current study was carried out in a multidisciplinary, project-based, service learning program in a Midwest land-grant university. The research team developed four major learning objectives for cross-disciplinary team learning (CDTL) based on a theory-driven framework for CDTL. The purpose of the study is to better understand students’ self-efficacy for four CDTL objectives developed for project-based design team environments. Initial survey measures of pre-post project confidence levels across these dimensions have been developed and piloted in Fall ’09 semester and all partner programs have been invited to pilot these measures in the Spring ’10 semester. Preliminary data shows that students’ understanding of cross-disciplinary team learning was influenced by their prior experience working on multi-disciplinary teams, as well as their disciplinary and design knowledge. Finally, student reflections suggest that engagement in deep design discussions has an important integrating role relative to CDTL in project-based environments.

AN INTERACTIVE WEB-BASED QUIZ THAT USES THE JAVA-DSP EDITOR TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING EXPERIENCE Shalin M Mehta, Andreas Spanias and Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan Java- Digital Signal Processing (J-DSP) is an online DSP laboratory that allows students to simulate various signal processing algorithms. In this paper, we describe an interactive learning tool that combines multiple discrete learning environments together at one place. The idea of the new interface revolves around the web-based DSP quiz synchronized with J-DSP simulations and video streamed lectures. This setup helps in organizing the learning process as the multiple environments are linked together through the questions posed in the quiz. The proposed interface is currently being used by the undergraduate students in the DSP course. Preliminary assessment results will be presented at the conference. Session T2H: Factors Affecting Retention of Students from Underrepresented Populations in STEM Chair: Susan K. Donohue, The College of New Jersey Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon H INDIVIDUAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS THAT SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACT SHORT- AND LONG-TERM INTEREST IN ENGINEERING Elizabeth G. Creamer, Catherine T. Amelink and Peggy S. Meszaros This paper provides data and recommendations for best practices grounded in the argument that a set of individual qualities and elements of the educational setting that have been identified in the research literature as playing a significant role in promoting women’s retention in engineering majors and interest in engineering as a career, have similarly significant effects on men’s interests. Data from questionnaires completed by students in eight colleges or schools of engineering (N=1629) and from interviews conducted during nine campus visits demonstrated the importance of one individual quality—motivation—and one environmental quality – perceptions of support from

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 93 Thursday Sessions family and friends—on both the short- and long-term interest in engineering of male and female undergraduate engineering majors. The perception that faculty members and peers cared about them and respected their ability to succeed in engineering was significant in predicting both men’s and women’s intent to remain in an engineering major. These finding underscore the importance of interactions that communicate the conviction that students have the ability and commitment to succeed in engineering. CLIMATE IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING EDUCATION FROM 1995 TO 2009 Michelle Madsen Camacho, Susan M. Lord, Catherine E Brawner and Matthew W Ohland Researchers have long been interested in understanding the “climate” in undergraduate engineering programs. These themes are particularly important for underrepresented groups in engineering such as women. We examine how students perceive climate and how these attitudes vary by gender. Using a repeated cross-sectional design, we compare populations at three institutions from 1995 (N=2279) to 2009 (N=1590) to understand how students’ perceptions have changed. Overall, the climate seems to have improved from 1995 to 2009. However, women and men differ in some perceptions of climate. We analyzed student responses from a framework of considering structural factors, faculty factors, and factors related to student agency. Women and men respond similarly on items measuring quality of teaching, perceptions of being taken seriously by faculty, and perceptions of cooperative relationships between male and female students. However, women score differently from men on items measuring perceptions of fairness, participation in study groups, and issues of diversity. Improving recruitment and persistence of women requires a nuanced understanding of the climactic conditions that promote their success. INSPIRED BROADENING PARTICIPATION IN COMPUTING: MOST SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES AND LESSONS LEARNED Peggy Doerschuk, Jiangjiang Liu and Judith Mann Lamar University's Increasing Student Participation in Research Development Program (‘INSPIRED’) is an NSF-sponsored Broadening Participation in Computing project that seeks to increase participation of females and underrepresented minorities in computing. This comprehensive multi-dimensional program includes a broad spectrum of supporting activities that are designed to attract, retain and transition students to the computing workforce. This paper briefly describes the motivation for the program, the research that underpins its strategies, and a comparison of the INSPIRED approach with other existing efforts. Well-developed approaches for assessing the impact of the strategies on student participants are also discussed. The paper focuses on practical methods for the implementation of the most effective program components and includes suggestions for those who would like to adopt them. Lessons learned from experience are used to address components receiving variable ratings or having the least positive impact. WORK IN PROGRESS - INITIAL IDENTIFICATION OF PROGRAM COMPONENTS LEADING TO RETENTION OF WOMEN IN A PRE-ENGINEERING HIGH SCHOOL PROGRAM, AND AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING PROGRAM Mary Kasarda, Brenda Brand, Eileen Weigand, Hank Yochum and Michael Collver This paper presents preliminary results from an NSF-sponsored project, Why Women Stay: An Investigation of Two Successful Programs. Our initial findings from interviews conducted with high school level students, (both males and females) and college age female students are revealing some of the reasons why girls and young women are staying in engineering programs. We are seeing the positive program components are those that directly contributed to creating a supportive stress-free environment, which made the technical applications accessible and technical skill acquisition possible. Girls in the high school program and the women in the college program noted the inclusive team-oriented and mutual goal-oriented engineering experiences through team design projects as those critical to their successes. In comparison, the male high-school students focused more on mastery experiences and technical/engineering skill acquisition. Goal- oriented engineering rather than content oriented learning benefited all of the students. Preliminary analysis of all interviews indicates that in order to retain women in engineering, programs must be designed to support women in stress-reduction including overcoming negative social perceptions about their ability to participate (inclusion) and succeed in engineering, and give them confidence to tackle technical/engineering challenges that they will encounter. WORK IN PROGRESS - WHY MANY SMART WOMEN LEAVE ENGINEERING: A PRELIMINARY STUDY OF HOW ENGINEERING STUDENTS FORM CAREER GOALS Serena Wee, Rose Mary Cordova-Wentling, Russell F. Korte, Susan M. Larson and Michael C. Loui This study examined how undergraduate engineering students form career goals. We hypothesized that a student’s development of an engineering identity might be correlated with that student’s persistence in engineering. We focused on four areas: (a) motivations for studying engineering, (b) engineering-related experiences, (c) fit

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 94 Thursday Sessions perceptions, and (d) engineering-related self-efficacy. We employed a mixed-methods approach: we surveyed all engineering freshmen, and we conducted eight single-sex focus group interviews (one male and one female group at each of four college levels). A total of 1351 (19% female, 81% male) engineering freshmen and 42 (60% female, 40% male) focus group members participated in the study. Statistical analysis of the survey data showed that freshman female engineering students tended to have significantly lower self-efficacy than freshman male engineering students, although they tended to have higher outcome expectations than their male counterparts. Preliminary analysis of the qualitative data provided evidence that for both men and women, out-of class experiences such as internships, design projects, and participation in student organizations tended to increase engagement and commitment to engineering as a profession. Session T2J: Professional Skills I Chair: Lyn Brodie, The University of Southern Queensland Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon J WORK IN PROGRESS - LEARNING STYLES IN SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SYSTEMS Fernando Sanchez-Zamora, Martín Llamas-Nistal and Manuel Fernandez-Iglesias This work addresses the characterization of user behavior in social bookmarking systems such as Bibsonomy or Delicious. From an educational point of view, user behavior characterization is related to learning styles. E-learning activities such as adaptive learning or online coaching and mentoring may benefit from this characterization. WORK IN PROGRESS - PREPARING STUDENTS FOR LIFELONG LEARNING IN A CAPSTONE DESIGN ENVIRONMENT Gonca Altuger and Constantin Chassapis The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) criteria for 2009 – 2010 requires that engineering programs demonstrate that their students attain “a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in lifelong learning”, suggesting that it is crucial to prepare students to become lifelong learners. In the Mechanical Engineering Department of Stevens Institute of Technology, a series of modules (design, industry, project management) which have been prepared by the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) as part of its Professional Practice Curriculum (PPC), are implemented within the senior design course in an effort to prepare students for self-directed learning. The modules are supplemented with, downloadable materials and other multimedia features. This study addresses the issue by focusing on the implementation process and outcomes assessment of the self-directed learning (SDL) modules in a senior level undergraduate capstone design course. USING KNOWLEDGE BUILDING TO SUPPORT DEEP LEARNING, COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Glenn W. Ellis, Alan N. Rudnitsky and Mary A. Moriarty ⎯ Knowledge building is a potentially transformative approach to engineering education. In knowledge building students participate in an interactive discourse in which they work together to broaden ideas, reform problems and share knowledge—the result being a deeper level of understanding and the collaborative production of new knowledge. In 2009 we conducted a knowledge building pilot study in the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College. In this study students worked together to formulate a question about the potential for a conscious machine and then engaged in an intensive knowledge building discourse. Assessment data showing the effectiveness of the approach and research questions arising from the study are presented. WORK IN PROGRESS - ETHICS IN HUMANITARIAN ENGINEERING: A MEANS OF ASSESSMENT Ryan C. Campbell and Denise Wilson This paper reviews current approaches found in the engineering education literature to assess ethics instruction outcomes. Based on theoretical grounds, we believe that existing approaches are incomplete for use in an ethical framework appropriate for humanitarian engineering, i.e., one that includes not only an ethics of justice, but also an ethics of care. The paper describes an ongoing mixed-methods research study that seeks to assess this broader conception of ethics, and then focuses on one aspect of the study design: a self-report survey instrument adapted from the field of positive psychology. WORK IN PROGRESS - ETHICS IN ENGINEERING: A SIMPLE CASE OF STUDY USING STATEMENTS Inmaculada Plaza, Piedad Garrido, Carlos Medrano, Sagrario Sánchez and Martín Llamas-Nistal This paper describes a case of study developed in engineering degrees in order to transmit ethical values. The goal of this work is to show a specific example as a starting point to introduce students in a more ethical world. The case has been developed for eight years. By the middle of the course period, students are invited to think about how to take advantage of their stay in university in order to promote a better and more humane world. From that moment, 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 95 Thursday Sessions teachers start to write a statement with ethic contents in the blackboard at the beginning of every lecture. This statement seeks to promote the student’s inclination to act with ethical and humane behavior. Teachers have now a database with more than one hundred and forty statements... and the number is growing thanks to the participation of students! Following several student’s requests, teachers have increased their knowledge about the authors of the sentences. The final results show a high degree of student satisfaction and a good motivation. This experience can be extrapolated to other degrees or subjects. Session T3A: Special Session - Not All Problems Are Created Equal: From Problem-based Learning Theory to Research on Complex Problem Solving and Implications for the Engineering Classroom Chair: Olga Pierrakos, James Madison University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon A SPECIAL SESSION - NOT ALL PROBLEMS ARE CREATED EQUAL: FROM PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING THEORY TO RESEARCH ON COMPLEX PROBLEM SOLVING AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENGINEERING CLASSROOM Olga Pierrakos, Heather Watson, Ronald Kander, Javarro Russell and Robin Anderson Most of us acknowledge that not all problems are created equal and that different types of problems lead to different learning outcomes for students. For example, it is well-known that undergraduate engineering courses mainly focus on problems that are well-structured with known, correct solutions; yet, real-world practice is more suffused with complex and ill-structured problems. So, it is imperative that engineering students begin the real-world practice of problem solving within the undergraduate curriculum. Problem-based learning (PBL) is a powerful student-centered pedagogy that offers a strong framework upon which to build a curriculum that will allow all students to learn essential, real-world, and globally competitive problem solving skills. This special session is thus designed to not only provide participants with background on PBL theory and the nature of problems, but also to provide them with materials and resources on developing, classifying, and assessing a variety of PBL activities in their courses. It is hoped that this session will enable the facilitators and attendees to generate a collection of peer developed ideas and feedback on understanding the nature of problems and problem solving. The potential impacts of this session could have transformative implications for engineering education and student learning. Session T3B: Special Session - A War of Words: Using Sticky Language to Effect Change in Engineering Education Chair: Mark H. Somerville, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - A WAR OF WORDS: USING STICKY LANGUAGE TO EFFECT CHANGE IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Mark H Somerville, David E. Goldberg, Sherra E Kerns and Russell Korte Reform in engineering education requires not only identifying what needs to change, but also understanding implicit barriers to change and the tools that can help overcome them. Language is an excellent example of such a barrier, and of such a tool. For example, engineering educators sometimes refer to "the basics" (math, science, and engineering science) thereby assigning those topics a privileged position in the engineering canon; the same educators will sometimes use the term "soft" to deflate certain qualitative critical thinking, creative, and communications skills, thereby assigning them lower status—and less air time-in the education of student engineers. These examples demonstrate the ability of language to obstruct change, and also suggest that the careful choice of memorable or "sticky" locutions can provide reformers with a powerful means of reframing the debate. In this special session we examine the use of language in the resistance to and promotion of change, and identify promising locutions that can help transform engineering education. Session T3C: Learning Through Laboratory Experiences Chair: Gonca Altuger, Stevens Institute of Technology Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon C DESIGN OF A MULTI-PURPOSE EXPERIMENT FOR USE IN A FLUID MECHANICS LAB Dan Budny and Dave Torick A set of new experiments that include the use of a Pasco force and pressure transducer were created to demonstrate the basic concepts of fluid properties, pressure versus depth, force on a gate and the conservation of mass. By

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 96 Thursday Sessions designing a simple multi-purpose apparatus all of these basic principles were shown to the students. Preliminary results show that despite the simple nature of the experiments, the student understanding was increased. This paper will describe the concepts behind the design of the new experiments and discuss the preliminary results related to learning improvements discovered as a result of moving to a number of small scale experiments. WORK IN PROGRESS - UPDATES TO A MOBILE CIRCUITS-AND-SIGNALS LEARNING KIT THAT INCORPORATES A USB DATA ACQUISITION UNIT Steve Warren and Jianchu Yao Portable data acquisition (DAQ) toolkits can address issues faced by secondary Electronics curricula that employ benchtop laboratories. These issues include cost, overcrowding, lecture versus laboratory topic alignment, higher-level learning, and student/resource cultural mismatches. This paper presents updates to a Rapid Analysis and Signal Conditioning Laboratory (RASCL) toolkit which employs breadboarding resources, portable DAQ technology, and LabVIEW virtual instruments (VIs) that in aggregate allow a student to acquire circuit parameters and signals off campus. For the cost of two textbooks, this toolkit offers potential as a hands-on learning supplement for lecture material spanning multiple semesters, a hardware platform for distance-learning laboratories, and an alternative for traditional benchtop learning experiences. Hands-on exercises that incorporate these tools are being created and assessed in four courses at Kansas State University (KSU) (Electrical & Computer Engineering programs) and East Carolina University (ECU) (General Engineering program). MICROCONTROLLER SYSTEM: FROM CONCEPT TO PRINTED BOARD Edgard J. Guimarães and Neusa M.F. Oliveira A Microcontroller Systems course is now a days very important to electronic engineers. In this work, the development of laboratory classes to such course is presented. In these classes the objective is to provide the students with the skills necessary to acquire an analog signal, convert it to a digital signal able to be handled by a microprocessor and then convert the digital signal again to an analog signal to be used by a continuous system and effectively build the proposed system. Software tools are used to simulate the circuit designed, to test the program to be run in the microprocessor and to design the printed board layout on which the designed and simulated circuit will be built. The students, working in teams of two, effectively build the proposed system. When the system is built, each team of students must proposes a project to be developed using the boards already manufactured. These projects could be luminescence control, motor velocity control or another. Therefore, each team must study the system to be controlled, the delay time necessary to the signal processing and, eventually, build some physical structure to support the devices on the analog system. The success of this hands on process is verified by the enthusiasm of the students during the process of effectively build a physical system. WORK IN PROGRESS - INFLUENCES OF STUDENT EXPERIENTIAL BACKGROUND IN A PROBLEM-BASED MULTIDISCIPLINARY MICROFLUIDICS LABORATORY COURSE Catherine V. Maltbie, Suzanne van den Hoogenhof and Ian Papautsky This paper will focus on student experiences in a multidisciplinary microfluidics laboratory course and how these related to students’ course expectations, prior experiences and collaboration in laboratory groups as well as other factors. The course under discussion, initially developed at the University of Cincinnati, is a laboratory course that introduces undergraduate and graduate students to microfluidic device development. A unique aspect of the course, which is comprised of modeling, fabrication, and analysis of SU-8 micromixers, is the focus on an extended problem-based learning example that underlies all course activities. This course is an application in microfluidics, a multidisciplinary field that deals with the behavior and precise control of microliter and nanoliter volumes. The course is currently being expanded to four other universities with the assistance of an NSF CCLI Phase II grant (DUE-0814911). The dissemination at several sites allows the opportunity to examine the effects of differing student backgrounds on their experience with and reactions to the course structure and make recommendations to the project team regarding future pedagogical modifications that should be made to improve student learning and interest in pursuing microfluidics. LAB KITS USING THE ARDUINO PROTOTYPING PLATFORM John Sarik and Ioannis Kymissis We present a lab kit platform based on an Arduino microcontroller board and open hardware that enables students to use low-cost, course specific hardware to complete lab exercises at home. The platform is designed to be accessible to a wide range of students and easily adapted for other applications. Careful hardware selection allows existing laboratory exercises to be modified for use with the platform, and the platform enables new exercises that would not be possible in a traditional lab. We describe the adoption of these kits in a course designed for on-campus and remote students that teaches the science and technology of modern display systems. We find that the platform delivers a

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 97 Thursday Sessions consistent, high quality laboratory experience for both on-campus and remote students. Session T3D: Undergraduate Research Chair: Laura M. Stanley, Montana State University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS - DIVERSIFYING STEM: UNDERREPRESENTED STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES IN UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROGRAMS Terrell L. Strayhorn Analysis of data collected from 108 respondents to the Survey of Summer Research Programs were conducted using descriptive and multivariate statistics to measure students’ satisfaction with their SURE program, their level of engagement in the research project, and learning gains achieved as a result of participating in the program. Results suggest that SURE participants are generally satisfied with the program, despite some relative dissatisfaction with one’s mentor. Several learning outcomes are associated with participating in a SURE, and participation also seems to sustain or increase students’ interest rather than initiate new interest in graduate education. Background traits and learning gains were positive predictors of research self-efficacy, explaining approximately 52% of the variance in students’ confidence in their research skills. AN INTEGRATED UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH EXPERIENCE IN CONTROL, POWER ELECTRONICS, AND DESIGN USING A MICROMOUSE Sergio Garcia-Vergara, Jose Pabon-De Leon, Yancy Diaz-Mercado and Eduardo I Ortiz-Rivera This paper presents a Micromouse project - integrated with the power electronics undergraduate curriculum - as part of a complete undergraduate research experience. The project had several objectives: a) challenge the programming skills of the students, b) teach team integration for an efficient hardware and software development, c) solve engineering problems in order to have a better Micromouse design. Undergraduate student participation is further ensured by linking the Micromouse project to microprocessor programming, electromechanical applications, and other classes. After this research experience the undergraduate students will expand their knowledge on software, hardware, and design using an entertaining but fairly complicated project. Finally, the project will benefit the department in enhancing classroom instruction as well as student retention, graduate school recruitment, and a hands-on experience.

WORK IN PROGRESS - ENHANCING TEACHING-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING EDUCATION Rodolfo Salinas-Villarreal Practical experience in undergraduate engineering education is usually limited. In many cases, additional conceptual learning providing a sense of practical understanding is not provided in classroom lectures. Laboratory experiments that give an ability to solve particular practical problems are not enough for a student to gain sound understanding on how to apply those concepts. Therefore, methods such as in-class practical work can be used to provide students an improved practical knowledge to solve real world cases found in industry. This paper describes a teaching-learning environment based on practical teaching, in which students learn in a practical sense by working in a major project during the junior or senior year. Learning to apply knowledge and understanding the relationship between theory and practice by planning and building real working devices, lead to a higher degree of comprehension. Thus, we propose to enhance traditional in-class lectures by teaching the student how to use the device and understand how to solve particular problems. Practical conceptual learning gives the student ability to solve problems involving industrial settings, applying theoretical concepts to solve certain cases arising within a process, and face certain technical implementation issues that a device or mechanism in the process may have. WORK IN PROGRESS - PROMOTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHERS: EXAMINING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN FACULTY MEMBERS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN COLLEGIANS Tonya N. Saddler Unlike graduate students who report having faculty mentors, undergraduate students are less likely to report being mentored by a faculty member. Mentoring in higher education though can be a deeply rewarding experience for undergraduate students, contributing significantly to the student’s development [1]. This qualitative study explored the research collaborative experiences of nine African American undergraduate students and 10 faculty members participating in summer research programs at a predominately White Institution (PWI) to better understand the nature of these relationships and what the perceived benefits of engaging in these relationships are. Findings suggest that the research collaborative mentoring relationships between faculty members and students are not as collaborative as

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 98 Thursday Sessions anticipated, students gained a holistic view of the research process, increased research skills and experience, future opportunities, and personal and university support systems as benefits of the summer research experience. Faculty members reported gaining pragmatic benefits of collaborating with undergraduate students that included gaining assistance with research and new perspectives. WORK IN PROGRESS - DOES LEARNING ABOUT RESEARCH AFFECT THE GRADUATE DEGREE ASPIRATIONS OF STEM UNDERGRADUATES? A PATH ANALYSIS Terrell L. Strayhorn Path analysis techniques were employed to test a multi-stage causal model positing the influence of perceived learning gains on graduate degree aspirations among STEM undergraduates in structured undergraduate research experience (SURE) programs. Survey responses from 108 students enrolled in 4 SUREs at 3 major research universities were analyzed. Results suggest that research self-efficacy mediated, or served as an explanatory variable for, the effect of perceived learning gains in three areas on graduate degree aspirations. Other results suggest the value-added impact of SUREs on aspirations for graduate study. Findings lend support to the role of self-efficacy as explained in existing theory. Session T3E: Advancements in Computer Engineering Curricula Chair: Irena Bojanova, University of Maryland University College Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon K IMPACT OF COLLEGE LEARNING ON ENGINEERING CAREER PRACTICE Hoda Baytiyeh and Mohamad K. Naja Traditionally, engineering profession appears to be a technical field based on scientific discipline. However, the way engineering has been taught will not anymore create the innovative professionals that meet the standards of today’s market. Nowadays, the success of engineers is measured by their preparedness in adapting to new conditions and by their skills in applying technologies to find new solutions or to improve existing solutions. This research identifies learning deficiencies that hinder the success of novice engineers. Based on the ABET reform criteria, 188 engineers completed an online Likert- scaled survey that assesses their proficiencies regarding their technical, personal, and interpersonal skills. Also, open-ended questions were used to gather information identifying the needs that might facilitate the transition process to the engineering career. Participants are young practicing engineers, graduated from Universities in Lebanon and are currently employed in companies located in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Although participants possess an adequate level of theoretical and technical skills, noticeable weaknesses in creativity and innovation were found. Also, the results showed varied deficiencies in interpersonal and personal skills particularly in leadership, managerial, and multidisciplinary teamwork skills. WORK IN PROGRESS - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY INTRODUCTION TO MICROFABRICATION Weili Cui, Wayne Jones, David Klotzkin, Greta Myers and Bruce White Microfabrication is a critical area to many branches of science and engineering. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe our plan to introduce microfabrication technology in a comprehensive, cross-curricular way through lectures, demonstrations and experiments from freshman through junior classes across four disciplines (Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics). Immediately following, in the senior year, will be an opportunity for students in these disciplines to take a multidisciplinary microfabrication capstone course that will serve as a complete introduction to clean room theory and practice. This approach will fundamentally show microfabrication as being based on many disciplines and vital to most modern technologies. Assessment will be done for each level of the project, and assessment results will be used to continuously improve the course over time and gauge the success of attracting students into this area. WORK IN PROGRESS - ALL ABOARD THE ENGINEER OF 2020? PROGRAMS CHAIRS' AND FACULTY MEMBERS’ REPORTS OF CURRICULAR EMPHASES India M. McHale, Lisa R. Lattuca, Patrick T. Terenzini and Alexander C. Yin This work-in-progress paper presents initial findings from Prototype to Production, an NSF-funded, national benchmarking study of engineering education. The sample included 86 program chairs and 1,119 faculty members from six fields on 32 campuses. Surveys asked chairs and faculty how much curricular emphasis their programs and courses place on 25 topics and skills advocated in The Engineer of 2020 report from the National Academy of Engineering. The paper explores the extent to which faculty members’ and chairs’ responses are congruent and whether their reports vary by discipline, type of institution, and type of course. Results suggest that most programs and courses continue to stress technical engineering content. Some programs and faculty, however, are addressing professional topics such as globalization, contextual awareness, leadership, and diversity. Analyses indicate few

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 99 Thursday Sessions discrepancies between faculty and chairs’ reports, or among different institutions or engineering disciplines. However, certain topics tend to be emphasized more in first-year and capstone design courses than in required and elective engineering courses. A COMPUTER ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY BODY OF KNOWLEDGE Jeffrey J. Evans and Douglas W. Jacobson Educational programs in engineering and engineering technology have been developed to address many technical aspects associated with computers. Computer Engineering programs typically focus on the theoretical foundations related to machine and algorithm designs used to develop computers, producing highly skilled design and research engineers. Computer Engineering Technology (CpET) programs span a wide range of focus, from hardware and software development principles and practices to the latest advances in “applications”. Other programs tend to focus on Information Technology concepts and practices for the enterprise. This paper compares and contrasts CpET to other forms of computer, information, and network technology academic disciplines. We identify educational gaps that can be filled by 4-year CpET programs using the 2004 IEEE and ACM Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula “Body of Knowledge” for computer engineering, industry input, and institutional factors. This work also captures situations where combining CET and IT-centric disciplines can be useful to academic institutions, students and employers. ARMS FOR THE POOR: SELECTING A PROCESSOR FOR TEACHING COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE Alan Clements Teachers of computer architecture and organization courses have to choose a target processor to illustrate the basic principles of instruction set design. In this paper we suggest that it is time to choose the ARM processor architecture that is markedly different to those used in most current courses. A specific computer architecture is required as a vehicle to teach about registers, addressing modes, instruction types, and so on. Resorting to a hypothetical teaching machine reduces the student’s learning burden and makes their learning curve shallow, but failing to introduce them to the complexities they will encounter in the real world can destroy their motivation. Teachers are concerned not only with covering a body of knowledge; they must motivate students and create a sense of excitement. In a discipline as rapidly changing as computer science, only those students who can adapt to change are likely to thrive over the four or more decades of their career. This paper explains why the ARM architecture is an excellent vehicle for teaching computer architecture; in particular, its predicated execution, inclusion of shifting in all data-processing instructions, and its compressed code (Thumb) mode. Moreover, the ARM has a RISC architecture with some traditional CISC architectural features. Session T3F: Innovation in the Classroom II Chair: Kenneth S. Manning, SUNY Adirondack Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon E & F HDL-BASED INSTRUCTION ACROSS THE ECE CURRICULA John A. Nestor, John F Greco and Ismail Jouny This paper describes how design using a Hardware Description Language (HDL) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) was introduced throughout the Electrical and Computer Engineering Curricula at Lafayette College. Introduction of HDL-based design began in Senior-level electives and was then propagated downward into a Junior-level Computer Organization Course and then a two course Sophomore-level Digital Design sequence. Finally, HDL-based design was added to a Capstone course in which students design a complex network interface system using an FPGA and attached hardware. WORK IN PROGRESS - IMPLEMENTATION AND RESEARCH OF MASTERY LEARNING AT AN HBCU William J. Leonard, John C. Kelly and William J. Gerace While studying a Mastery approach for learning Engineering Circuit Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), early findings suggested that the approach improved the performance and retention of all students, with particularly dramatic results for women and minorities. However, because the number of women and minority students at UMA is small, we have decided to study the implementation of Mastery at an HBCU, specifically the College of Engineering at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT), one of the nation’s premier engineering schools with a predominantly African American student population. In this Work-in-Progress, we will summarize the features of Mastery learning that make it difficult, but attractive, to implement. We will also review the results for women and minority students at UMA. Then we will describe the recent trends in retention and graduation rates at NCAT that led the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department there to radically change how Circuit Analysis is taught. Finally, we will provide an overview of the research plan we

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 100 Thursday Sessions have developed for studying the implementation of Mastery learning. WORK IN PROGRESS - HYDROGEN ENERGY IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Eileen Cashman, Richard Engel and Peter Lehman The Hydrogen Energy in Engineering Education project is aimed at meeting the need for a new generation of graduating engineers trained in hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. The goals of this project, funded by DOE, are to increase the awareness of hydrogen technologies through hands-on learning experiences in existing undergraduate engineering courses and summer internships with industry partners. The project deliverables will include both laboratory hardware that is appropriate for university engineering laboratory classes and associated curriculum. WORK IN PROGRESS - SYNTHESIZING DESIGN, ENGINEERING, AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP THROUGH A MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT COURSE Mark L. Chang In this paper, we describe our experiences in designing and delivering a course that blends together design, engineering, and entrepreneurship through the use of mobile devices. The significance of this work is in advocating for and demonstrating the motivational and educational benefits of using a mobile platform, and describing how to utilize the mobile marketplace to provide an authentic, real-world experience across these three domains. WORK IN PROGRESS - SKUNK WORKS IMMERSION DESIGN EXPERIENCE, UTILIZATION OF THE LOCKHEED MARTIN SKUNK WORKS DESIGN PROCESS TO TEACH INNOVATION Nathan R. Huntoon and Delores Etter Southern Methodist University has partnered with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® to develop a program that emphasizes innovation while challenging students to excel. This paper discusses high pressure design challenges, or Immersion Design Experiences (IDE) which use components of the Skunk Works Design philosophy, modified for academia. IDEs take interdisciplinary teams comprised not only of engineering students, but students from across the academic spectrum, and have them design, fabricate and test a prototype that solves their assigned problem. A typical IDE is 10 days long, and is held over the long breaks between semesters. The time constraints and difficulties of the projects require full time attention to the design and encourage students to find innovative solutions necessitating that they are run during the breaks in the academic calendar. This paper will discuss these projects and report the results from our first IDE. Session T3G: Learning Models and Pedagogies Chair: Carla Romney, Boston University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - TOWARDS AN EMOTIONAL LEARNING MODEL FOR INTELLIGENT GAMING Karla Muñoz, Julieta Noguez, Paul Mc Kevitt, Tom Lunney and Luis Neri Recent research defines achievement emotions as emotions that are strongly related to learning and achievement contexts, where behaviors and outcomes arise during activities. Game-based learning environments reward the mastering of skills and abilities. This paper is focused on a qualitative and quantitative approach to recognizing the learner’s achievement emotions. Learners’ emotions are inferred from two sources: from observable behavior and from answers to questions in a game dialogue. The analysis and design involved in the creation of this affective student model are the central focus here. PlayPhysics, an emotional games learning environment, is being implemented for teaching Physics at undergraduate level. When our results are finalized our affective student model will be incorporated into PlayPhysics. To ensure accuracy of the recognition method, a preliminary prototyping study has been conducted. The results from this prototyping phase are presented and discussed. WORK IN PROGRESS - MEDICAL IMAGING EDUCATION BY A MULTI-LEVEL MODULE-BASED ONLINE TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT SYSTEM Xiping Li, Fabrice Manns and Weizhao Zhao Medical imaging education is a key training component in BME programs. Medical imaging curriculum involves physics principles, mathematical derivations, engineering implementations for teaching image generation, reconstruction and application. We developed an Internet accessible, multi-level module-based interactive system for teaching five commonly used medical imaging modalities. Each imaging modality is delivered by five to six teaching modules (topics). Teaching or learning proceeds on the module basis. The system is integrated by the open source MySQL database software that manages updating teaching materials and also tracks student’s learning gain through different assessments. Instructor gets instant feedback on the topic delivered through his/her lecture when students work on the system. We have applied this teaching/tracking system in small size classes. The result shows significant learning gains in our applications. We plan to complete all teaching modules and apply to other local institutions for 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 101 Thursday Sessions biomedical or other engineering students. WORK IN PROGRESS - HOW DO ENGINEERING STUDENTS MISUNDERSTAND NUMBER REPRESENTATIONS? Geoffrey Lindsay Herman, Michael C Loui and Craig Zilles It is often taken for granted that students who pursue engineering in college are “numbers people” who excel at mathematics. We believe that there is reason to doubt this assumption based on our studies of student misconceptions in first and second year engineering students. We interviewed and tested undergraduates in electrical and computer engineering or in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who had just completed a first course in digital logic. These interviews and tests required students to solve problems relating to binary arithmetic and number base conversions. We present our early findings from these interviews and assessment tools. STUDENTS' INTERPRETATION OF THE IMPORTANCE AND DIFFICULTY OF CONCEPTS IN SIGNALS AND SYSTEMS Jill K Nelson, Margret A Hjalmarson, Kathleen E Wage and John R Buck Two ongoing challenges facing instructors when designing courses are (1) do students identify/understand important concepts in the course, and (2) what makes concepts difficult for students to understand? In particular, do students see the relationship between the procedures taught and the fundamental concepts they support? In this study, we use interviews with 39 undergraduate engineering students to address these questions in the context of a sophomore-level continuous-time signals and systems course. Each student interviewed was asked which concept in the course was most difficult, which was most important, and why. Student responses regarding the concepts and the reasons were qualitatively analyzed, and a codebook was developed. The results of the coding provide broad insight into what factors make a particular concept difficult and/or important from the student perspective. We conjecture that general elements drawn from the results obtained here can be applied beyond signals and systems and across the engineering curriculum.

WIP - A BIOMEDICAL MOTIF FOR TEACHING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN CONTEXT James Wolfer The majority of the classes in a typical computer science program focus on the computer as an entity and the resulting development infrastructure. Examples include hardware principles, architecture and theory, along with software development tools and processes. Recent studies have suggested that a focus on the computational infrastructure in the absence of an external application domain may reinforce the stereotype of CS student fixation on the computer for some, while alienating a subset of students, especially women, who may be attracted to using the computer to solve broader problems. Recognizing this situation has inspired recent explorations on teaching computer science within an application context. Even classes traditionally focused on techniques and problems beyond the computer itself, such as Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), are often presented as a collection of techniques, programs, and principles without systematic "real-world" grounding. Inspired by work on teaching Computer Graphics in context, this work-in-progress describes an infrastructure for embedding a biomedical motif into the traditional Artificial Intelligence course. Session T3H: Professional Skills II Chair: Chrys Demetry, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon H WORK IN PROGRESS - ROLE OF FACULTY IN PROMOTING LIFELONG LEARNING: INITIAL FINDINGS John C. Chen, Susan M. Lord, Katharyn Nottis, Michael Prince, Candice Stefanou and Jonathan Stolk Calls for educational reform emphasize the need for student-centered learning approaches that foster lifelong learning. To be a lifelong learner includes characteristics consistent with those of self-directed learners, such as being curious, motivated, reflective, analytical, persistent, flexible, and independent. Instructor support of students’ self-directed learning (SDL) development relies on understanding and balancing these factors in the classroom. Engineering educators play a critical role in influencing outcomes related to SDL through their design of courses that support students’ transitions from controlled to autonomous learning behaviors. This study will examine a variety of engineering courses and pedagogical approaches. Each will be characterized using instructor course information, recorded observations of instructor-student and student-student interactions, student and instructor responses to surveys, and focus groups. Finally, the students’ capacity for SDL will be measured using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. This approach should provide for rich, contextualized descriptions of what instructors and learners do, how instructors and students relate to each other, and how students view their classrooms. This

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 102 Thursday Sessions work-in-progress paper will describe our initial work in this multiyear study. WORK IN PROGRESS - ADVISING TOOL TO IMPROVE THE TIME FOR GRADUATION AND THE TRANSFER OF STUDENTS FROM A COMMUNITY COLLEGE TO ENGINEERING SCHOOL Virgilio Gonzalez and Daniel Esparza The objective of this work is to demonstrate a mechanism to improve the advising of students in a nontraditional environment. We applied two project management tools designed to help the students complete their degree plan sooner. The first tool provides a visualization map of course sequences, customized for each student, making advising adjustments that will optimize the time to obtain the degree under a constrained set of resources. The second tool collects information from multiple students through several semesters and can be used to identify bottlenecks in the curriculum. This article shows the application of the first tool in our university and in the local community college. The purpose is to optimize the time for graduation and align the students before transferring to our programs. GRADUATE STUDENTS DESIGNING GRADUATE ASSESSMENT: EPORTFOLIO DESIGN AS PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING Lisa D. McNair and Maura Borrego We present results from a graduate course project to design an ePortfolio tool to support graduate program assessment, student learning development, and professional preparation for a “client” traditional engineering department. Students were tasked with meeting their clients, conducting a needs assessment, and designing and presenting an assessment plan using ePortfolio. Student reflections on the project, a focus group, and artifacts prepared for the client served as our data sources. The students encountered significant challenges transferring theory to practice in a real-world context, specifically balancing client desires with good assessment practice. This department’s approach to annual reviews was primarily as administrative, data-driven reporting. The final design met several quantitative data needs, but also included opportunities for reflection and professional goal-setting. As a PBL assignment, the project helped these future engineering educators explore their values, career aspirations and goals, particularly in regards to spanning the gap between education practice and research. These students clearly indicated that the project was challenging but extremely valuable in preparing them for their chosen careers, and helped to reinforce their decisions. The project also increased students’ awareness and engagement in the processes and challenges of program assessment, situating assessment as an integral component of engineering education.

"I HAVE NEVER SPENT TIME TO THINK ABOUT WHAT I HAVE GAINED FROM MY PROJECTS": LINKING PORTFOLIO DEVELOPMENT AND LIFE-LONG LEARNING Brook Sattler, Deborah Kilgore and Jennifer Turns With NSF funding, we have been exploring students’ conceptions of life-long learning and how the construction of professional portfolios can contribute to preparing students to engage in life-long learning. In this paper, we discuss broad ideas related to life-long learning, the role of self-awareness in life-long learning, and the potential for portfolio construction to support life-long learning generally and the development of self-awareness specifically. Our paper includes both a literature review related to these topics as well as themes resulting from an analysis of interviews with students concerning these topics. We close by suggesting implications. WORK IN PROGRESS - CONNECTING VETERANS TO CUSTOMIZED ENGINEERING EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO Susan M. Lord, Kathleen A Kramer and Rick T Olson In 2008, the Post-9/11 GI Bill was passed to improve the educational opportunities available for military veterans. Along with increased financial support, the Yellow Ribbon Program was created to make it easier for veterans to afford private colleges and universities. At the same time, the National Science Foundation and other agencies are recognizing a critical shortage of engineers. This paper describes the measures being taken at USD to provide customized undergraduate engineering education opportunities for Post-9/11 veterans. The immediate goals of the project are 1) to develop strategies for recruiting veterans into engineering fields, 2) to determine how military experiences and education can be recognized by the university, 3) to identify the unique support services needed to best assure veteran student success, and 4) to identify internship and summer research experiences that can provide additional financial support to the students. The scope of the project requires collaboration from across campus including academic faculty and staff and supporting administrative areas ranging from the Registrar, to Counseling, to Housing. The results of this project will help other universities attract veterans as new students, and graduate them as engineers.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 103 Thursday Sessions Session T3J: Degree Programs and Courses Chair: Ibibia Dabipi, University of Maryland Eastern Shore Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Salon J VERTICAL INTEGRATION OF SYSTEM-ON-CHIP AND GREEN ENGINEERING ACROSS THE UNDERGRADUATE CURRICULUM Ravi P. Ramachandran, Peter M. Jansson, Ying Tang, Linda M. Head and Lawrence Chatman Vertical integration is significant in achieving better student comprehension of the connections among topics and concepts covered in various courses taught during the same or different semesters of the curriculum. Students realize that the courses are part of a flow that contributes to a knowledge base without artificial boundaries rather than being separate bodies of knowledge. In this paper, vertical integration is achieved by a series of laboratory exercises in two areas (System-on-Chip and Green Engineering) that start as well-structured experiments at the lower levels and proceed as increasingly complex open-ended design projects at upper levels of the curriculum. Quantitative assessment results clearly show that students understand that concepts carry over from one course to another as a result of the laboratory projects. Clinic assessment results are also very encouraging. WORK IN PROGRESS - LEVERAGING ACCREDITATION EFFORTS TO FOSTER INNOVATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Marcel Castro-Sitiriche, Efraín O'Neill-Carrillo, Christopher Papadopoulos, Cristina Pomales-García, Aidsa Santiago-Román and Jaime Seguel In its continued quest for excellence in engineering education, the College of Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM) has unified accreditation activities, formal studies in engineering education, and work on social, ethical, and global issues under a holistic umbrella in the reformed Office for Strategic Engineering Education Development (SEED). This integrated approach is founded on the philosophy that a holistic preparation of engineering professionals with diverse academic activities will spawn important impacts beyond the borders of UPRM, and the recognition that achieving and measuring these impacts requires implementation of best practices coupled with formal assessment and research. This paper will describe the framework, strategies and procedures that underpin the new SEED Office. As leadership and active participation of the faculty are essential to advancing and maintaining educational innovation, the SEED strategy will support faculty to implement classroom best practices based on research and assessment outcomes. The authors contend that success of the new SEED Office activities will engender a world-class engineering educational environment at UPRM. MICROELECTRONIC ENGINEERING EDUCATION FOR EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES Santosh Kurinec, Michael Jackson, Davide Marriotti, Surendra Gupta, Sean Rommel, Dale Ewbank, Karl Hirschman, Robert Pearson and Lynn Fuller The Department of Microelectronic Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology received NSF Department Level Reform (DLR) planning and implementation grants in 2003-04 and 2005-10, respectively. The primary mission of these efforts was to evaluate and develop educational initiatives towards nanotechnology aligned with recommendations from the institution of National Nanotechnology Initiatives published by the US Government in 2000. The Department proposed to take this opportunity further and guide its curriculum toward new frontiers in nanotechnology and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMs). Advances in semiconductor technology have resulted in micro/nanofabrication techniques being employed in MEMs, chemical & bio sensors, and in energy harvesting devices and systems. The technology has evolved through aggressive process control and scalability characterized by Moore’s Law. The result has been emergence of a multifunctional “More than Moore” regime that is increasingly multidisciplinary in nature. Under this effort, new courses and curricula in Microelectronics and Nanofabrication providing access to state-of-the art semiconductor fabrication facilities to students from different science and engineering programs have been formulated. INTEGRATED STUDY PROGRAMS THROUGH E-LEARNING Sandra Aguirre, Juan Quemada and Joaquín Salvachúa In the unstoppable process of globalization and educational convergence, the use of e-Learning as a support tool in educational programs is becoming a growing trend. A wide diversity of proprietary and open-source e-Learning platforms are available. However, these platforms are generally developed independently by different organizations, and different technologies are used in them. As a result, the implementation of integrated study programs by means of e-Learning systems requires the solution of several technical difficulties generated by the heterogeneity of systems. In order to identify the variables, rules and components that should be taken into account in our proposal, we have analyzed several collaboration agreements between universities at national, European and international levels as well as e-Learning frameworks. This paper introduces the design of a federated service-oriented 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 104 Thursday Sessions architecture, whose implementation will be based on Web Services. We have developed a prototype that allows the implementation of this architecture. To achieve this goal, we have used an open source platform, such as Moodle and a proprietary platform like Blackboard. ADAPTING COMPUTING CURRICULA TO A MULTICORE WORLD Richard LeBlanc and Michael Wrinn The impact of ubiquitous parallel computing hardware on computing curricula is examined in this paper, with a focus on identifying new outcomes to drive curriculum evolution. Session T4A: Special Session - Integrating Learning Communities into Engineering Curricula Chair: Reid Bailey, University of Virginia Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon A SPECIAL SESSION - INTEGRATING LEARNING COMMUNITIES INTO ENGINEERING CURRICULA Reid Bailey, Marie Shoffner and Heather Rowan-Kenyon Learning communities are not new; in fact, there is a large body of literature on learning communities. Based on the number of citations on learning communities from different fields, however, learning communities remain underutilized in engineering compared to other disciplines. Furthermore, learning communities are particularly helpful in interdisciplinary curricula while, at the same time, the focus on interdisciplinary curricula is becoming more prevalent in engineering. Based on the authors’ direct involvement in developing and running a learning community for an interdisciplinary program, we know how critical learning communities can be in establishing a collective identity and providing a space for reflection. The aim of this special session is to help others recognize roles a learning community can play and to give practical support to help attendees transfer the well-established literature on learning communities into practice. Session T4B: Special Session - Henry’s Daughters: A New Engineering Ethics Movie Chair: Michael C. Loui, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - HENRY’S DAUGHTERS: A NEW ENGINEERING ETHICS MOVIE Michael C. Loui, Jimmy H. Smith, Joseph R. Herkert and Steven P. Nichols The National Institute for Engineering Ethics has produced a new movie, Henry’s Daughters, to aid in teaching professional ethics in engineering. The movie highlights ethical issues at both individual and societal levels. In this special session, participants will learn how to use two cooperative learning strategies together with the new movie. Participants will also learn a classroom assessment technique. Session T4C: Courseware Technologies Applications II Chair: Paul Flikkema, Northern Arizona University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon C TABLET PCS IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS Carla A. Romney Undergraduate students often struggle to learn mathematics because introductory classes are taught in large lectures that do not engage students in active problem-solving. These students do not connect mathematics to their lives and feel that learning mathematics is a solitary undertaking. We now use Tablet PCs in a networked classroom to address these challenges. Students in classes that use the Tablet PCs can view and annotate the instructor’s Powerpoint slides in real time and also participate in interactive problem-solving. Students save their own annotated slides for subsequent review. They also have immediate access to the synchronized screen capture and audio recording of the class since the instructor posts this file to the course management website. These technological interventions allow students to focus on classroom activities rather than on note-taking. To date, students have taken three introductory undergraduate mathematics courses (College Algebra and Trigonometry, Calculus I, and Calculus II) using Tablet PCs. Student attendance and retention were better in the cohort of students who participated in the Tablet PC courses than in comparable non-Tablet PC courses taught by the same instructor. The evaluation of the instructor was unchanged.

WORK IN PROGRESS - A REAL TIME JAVA PROGRAMMING ONLINE ASSESSMENT SYSTEM Minzhe Guo, Kai Qian, Li Yang and Prabir Bhattacharya With the goals of engaging students in learning programming, increasing students’ learning confidence, and

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 105 Thursday Sessions improving retention of CS students, this paper presents an innovative inquiry-based online real time Java programming assessment system for introductory Java programming course to facilitate the interaction between the instructor and students, the student collaboration in problem solving, and to enhance the student’s “learning by doing” and “learning from failure” activities. The system allows instructor to assess student learning progress in class instantly. The concept-proof prototype of the system is demonstrated and the preliminary in-class experiment receives positive feedbacks from students. WORK IN PROGRESS - GNSSEDUPACK: AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN THE FIELD OF GLOBAL NAVIGATION SATELLITE SYSTEMS Quang Xuan Phuong, Gabriella Povero and Gustavo Belforte The aim of this paper is to introduce the GnssEduPack, which is a training kit in the field of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) which is oriented towards university students and GNSS application developers. The whole idea behind the GnssEduPack is to provide students with a new tool, which, beside providing theoretical background and explanations, allows for consistent experimental activity with real GNSS signals thus bringing the student directly in contact with practice. The key feature of the GnssEduPack is the emphasis on practical problems of real GNSS oriented engineering, which is made possible by the use of the SAT_SURF Suite, a light, compact and easy-to-use hardware/software experimental platform. ANIMATIONS AS A TOOL FOR ENHANCING TEACHING AND LEARNING OUTCOMES IN CIVIL ENGINEERING COURSES Vasantha Aravinthan and John Worden Many students today are visual learners and little inclined to study printed materials or text-based on-line courses. Animations can serve as effective multimedia tools to engage these students while facilitating and enhancing the student learning experience by explaining difficult concepts through visual means instead of the traditional way of heavy textual based presentation. The importance of animations would further be realized especially when the courses are offered at distance mode where students have to rely solely on the course materials to gain in-depth understanding. The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Australia is internationally recognized for its external delivery of courses. In this paper, we discuss the design and delivery of animations for two courses namely Public health Engineering and Geology and Geomechanics that are normally perceived to be challenging by civil and environmental engineering undergraduates. A new and innovative teaching approach was required to facilitate the students’ learning of these unfamiliar materials in these courses. Animations including multimedia facilities were conceived as a better way of presenting the concepts to the students. In this paper, we discuss and further evaluate the overall performance of students as a result of introducing animations into the curriculum. ON THE DESIGN OF INTERACTIVE CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENTS BASED ON THE TABLET PC TECHNOLOGY José-V. Benlloch-Dualde, Félix Buendía and Juan Carlos Cano Nowadays, the widespread adoption of the Bologna Process in Spanish universities, is demanding to put into practice innovative proposals. There is no doubt that methodologies must move from traditional style and concept-based teaching to student-centred and competency-based instruction. A novel approach to design interactive classroom environments supported by mobile Tablet PC technology is presented. It is focused on integrating formative assessment into classroom practices and providing students with immediate feedback. We describe the six steps of the proposed approach and how they are implemented in a first-year Computer Engineering course. Initial results have showed that the dropout rate in the experimental group has been reduced more than 50%, while the number of students passing the course has almost doubled over the control group. Our approach has also promoted the students’ autonomy and motivation, thereby improving their academic performance and enhancing their self-confidence in the learning process. Session T4D: Potpourri: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Learning Chair: Tom Merrill, Rowan University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon D SPELLIT: DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTI-TOUCH APPLICATION TO FOSTER LITERACY SKILLS AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS Florian Scharf, Silke Günther, Thomas Winkler and Michael Herczeg This paper describes SpelLit, an application, which fosters literacy skills at elementary schools. For the development of our educational software, traditional concepts of learning have been adapted to fit the UniTable, a multi-touch tabletop system for educational purposes, aiming at students of all ages. Multi-touch technology lets users interact in

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 106 Thursday Sessions easy and direct ways with computers. Being able to combine auditory, visual and haptic senses can improve the quality of learning, especially for young children. In this paper, it is shown that aspects of learning improve when well-established learning concepts are mapped to this new kind of interface. The UniTable as well as SpelLit have been developed in a user-centered process during several iterations, tests, and discussions with children and teachers as well as a speech therapist. With their help, it was possible to design hard- and software, appropriate for the use in schools. DEVELOPMENT OF AN ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT TO EXAMINE OUTCOMES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION ON ENGINEERING STUDENTS Nathalie Duval-Couetil, Teri Reed-Rhoads and Shiva Haghighi This paper describes the development of a comprehensive assessment instrument to examine the multiple outcomes of entrepreneurship education for engineering students. It is targeted at senior-level students enrolled in capstone engineering design courses and is part of a larger study intended to clarify the relationship between faculty beliefs and practices, program characteristics, and student outcomes. The assessment draws on survey items used within the investigators’ own engineering and entrepreneurship programs as well as others identified in the literature. Items fall into six categories including: 1) attitudes, 2) behaviors, 3) knowledge and skills, 4) self-efficacy, 5) perceptions of programs and faculty, and 6) demographic data. The paper provides an overview of the assessment instruments that were considered by the research team and the methodology used to create the final student survey. It discusses challenges encountered during development and administration including identifying validated assessments in the field, selecting response scales, survey length, and student and faculty participation. Preliminary results from year one of data collection across multiple institutions are discussed.

A MODEL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING STUDENTS Simona Doboli, Gerda L. Kamberova, John Impagliazzo, Xiang Fu and Edward H. Currie Creativity and innovativeness are among the most essential attributes of engineering graduates and also of successful entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship, or the process of starting a new venture, is one of the main roads to new technological innovations. This paper presents two novel models of entrepreneurship education integrated in computer science and computer engineering curricula and geared towards computing students with entrepreneurial intentions. To expose all computing students to entrepreneurial ideas and to spark their entrepreneurial spirit, we also developed several entrepreneurship add-on modules for existing CS and CE disciplines. All these programs have been developed and implemented at Hofstra University, with modules implemented also at Qatar University. Preliminary evaluation results are presented and discussed. IDENTIFICATION IN WEB EVALUATION IN LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM BY FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM Rosario Gil, Manuel Castro and Mudasser Wyne This article and the project in which is integrated, is part of the TIC tools in Higher education. The project integrates a biometric identification module based on techniques of fingerprint recognition in the educational communities and learning management systems where most of the courses for distance education are held. It seeks its integration into traditional or local environments. The project aims to cover all the weaknesses that traditionally have the password or user name. WORK IN PROGRESS - EXPANSION OF AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING DEGREE PROGRAM TO INCLUDE FULLY ON-LINE STUDIES AT A DISTANCE Stephanie L. Moore and James F. Groves In fall of 2007, the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Engineering and Applied Science initiated a partnership with the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) to create a new undergraduate education opportunity that would allow students to remain in their local community for all of their undergraduate engineering studies. Through the partnership, students can complete a two-year engineering associate degree in the VCCS. Successful students can then transfer to UVA for third and fourth year undergraduate studies that lead to an existing, non-ABET accredited Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Science. All necessary UVA classes are made available in a highly interactive on-line format to the students located across Virginia. The cooperative program was motivated by multiple requests from communities and engineering firms located in Virginia that wanted increased access to undergraduate engineering education and talent local to their communities. The details of the program design for the distributed learning system that blends on-campus and off-campus learners will be reviewed, and programmatic-level indicators of success to date will be given. This review reflects design-based research principles, and, in addition, the program has adopted an evaluation approach which reviews the systemic impact of the program across the state.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 107 Thursday Sessions ANALYZING ENGINEERING DESIGN STORIES – PREDICTING ENGAGEMENT IN INVENTIVE ACTION Barbara Karanian, Jordan Cox, David Green, Donald Ike, Gregory Kress and Cliff Nass In this experiment we intend to discover characteristics of stories that make them effective and utilize the findings to teach engineers and designers effective storytelling to create inventive action. One central research question organized the study: How do ineffective stories predict disengagement? A paper and pencil test and a projective cue method are utilized to uncover preliminary findings. Results from four audiences in one experiment show a high engagement for an effective delivery and some surprises concerning engagement regardless of delivery. The experiment also reveals that participants imagining what would happen next in the ineffective story included a surprising amount of communication cue suggestions for the ineffective story. Achievement motives were also clearly stated across all stories. Results provide us with promising evidence to suggest that we are able to connect audience engagement with the level of effectiveness of a story. Finally, we discuss implications for further work and applications of the findings in engineering/design education. Session T4E: Promoting Student Engagement with Innovative Pedagogies Chair: Roberta Harvey, Rowan University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon K WORK IN PROGRESS - USING VIDEO AND SELF-REFLECTION TO ENHANCE UNDERGRADUATE TEAMS Nick Tatar, Debbie Chachra, Yevgeniya V. Zastavker and Jonathan Stolk Engineers today must be able to communicate and collaborate in teams. They also must be comfortable making adjustments within the team to maintain flow and progress toward project goals. With these goals in mind, students in a first-semester engineering seminar course were asked to videotape a team meeting in their design course and to write a self-reflection paper after viewing their video. After analyzing the video, students were asked to provide clear suggestions in their self-reflection paper for improving their own and their team’s performance. Our preliminary analysis showed that video-supported reflections: 1) may be more effective than memory for identifying problems within the team; 2) can encourage detailed analysis about students’ interactions with each other; 3) can be used to help provide feedback on each student’s and the teammates behaviors; and 4) can be an efficient tool for generating an effective problem-solving environment.

FIRST YEAR CROSS-FUNCTIONAL DESIGN TEAMS: ENGINEERING AND BUSINESS Nancy K. Sundheim and JoAnn L. Asquith Engineers need to be able to work on cross-functional teams. Some researchers advocate exposing first year students to the professional skills, and then reinforce them throughout the curriculum. A collaborative effort was made between a first-year introductory engineering course and an introductory marketing course. As each team of engineers worked on a product improvement design project, a team of marketing students developed a marketing plan for their proposed product. Nearly 40% of the engineering projects incorporated very specific design changes as a direct result of the input from their marketing partners. Further, an additional 46.5% of the teams seriously considered the marketing input. As expected, the greatest obstacle was finding meeting times that would work for both teams. Although appreciated, 25% of students indicated communication with non-engineers was difficult. Despite these obstacles, the collaboration was successful in promoting cross-functional teamwork. Many students, 69%, valued the input and indicated the best aspect of this project was learning to communicate with non-engineers. WORK IN PROGRESS - ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP PROGRAM: THE FIRST YEAR EXPERIENCE Elif Eda Miskioglu, Krishna S Athreya, Nidhi Bhandari, Michael T. Kalkhoff, Diane T. Rover, Alexandra M. Black and Nathan D. Meisgeier The Engineering Leadership Program (ELP) founded at Iowa State University in 2006 is a four year student run leadership development program for undergraduate engineering students. The ELP is continually adapting to feedback from the scholar community, however the first year experience has emerged as a well structured learning experience. The first year ELP experience is designed to create a close knit community. Following a community building retreat, first-year scholars meet weekly in a credit bearing seminar taught by upper class scholars. In their second semester, scholars design and implement a service learning project, following a six sigma process. In the four years of ELP, the first year experience has led to a strong community within each cohort, which is highly valued by the scholars. As they progress through the program, they continue to seek opportunities to strengthen their relationships across cohorts. This model could be replicated more broadly within engineering and beyond for enhancing student engagement and retention.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 108 Thursday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - ELICITING INTUITIVE UNDERSTANDINGS OF BINARY OPERATIONS IN A FIRST COURSE ON COMPUTER ORGANIZATION Eric A. Freudenthal, Bivas Das and Avranil Tah This paper describes continuations to the reform of a sophomore-level course in computer organization for our Computer Science BS curriculum, where, Java and integrated IDEs have been adopted as the only language and development environments used in the first three semesters of study. A major objective of our approach is the minimization of cognitive overload, through the incremental introduction of the concepts using carefully designed sequences of concrete examples that provide intuition prior to the commencement of formal analysis. In this paper, we examine approaches for teaching students a variety of techniques for manipulating binary numeric encodings designed to provide mathematical insights rather than rely upon an expectation of student’s mathematical maturity. WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONAS: EMPHASIZING HUMAN NEED IN A FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING CAPSTONE COURSE John K. Estell and Kenneth J. Reid Engineers play a prominent role in the development of devices that improve nearly every aspect of life; however, the general public, including potential engineering students, often fails to see engineering as a profession that helps society. To help address this, the culminating capstone course in the first-year engineering program at Ohio Northern University recently incorporated requirements for student projects to address poverty alleviation in a Third World country. This allows students to better establish a connection between engineering and society, and to design a system within realistic engineering constraints. When assessing student performance after adding this requirement, evidence indicated that students had difficulty relating to the problem of poverty, as it was presented abstractly. Accordingly, personas – fictitious characters created to represent the goals and behaviors of a particular demographic of interest – are being developed to “humanize” the problem for the students. A persona is presented as a one- or two-page description that includes appropriate background information regarding a “typical” member of the targeted demographic along with a few fictional personal details to make the persona subject appear to be a realistic, believable character. Personas have been successfully used in fields such as marketing as they constitute effective “test platforms” for guiding decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design.

WORK IN PROGRESS - ENGINEERING FOR SOCIETY: ENGAGING STUDENTS THROUGH ENERGY INNOVATION VENTURES Nada Anid As reported by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES 2009-161), approximately one third of students who enter an undergraduate program in STEM switched to a non-STEM field over the next six years. NYIT, together with Columbia University, Syracuse University and Rowan College joined to form a unique collaborative, multi-institutional framework aimed at increasing the number of college graduates in STEM fields. The project utilizes energy as the unifying innovation and discovery theme to engage students through integrated (STEM) programs and activities and entice them to consider engineering as a career path. Various scientific, energy-related engineering concepts will be identified, and curriculum-appropriate teaching modules and activities around those concepts will be developed and integrated into high school and college curricula. The project specific goals are: 1) To develop content in the area of energy engineering in college and high school curricula, 2) To enhance creativity and invention around the energy engineering theme, 3) To utilize online technology and multi-media to ease communication and dissemination of energy engineering concepts and activities. This paper will present the commitments and strategies that NYIT, as a team member, will undertake to meet the goals of the project through its programs and course offerings and to organize on-site and virtual teachers’ workshops serving the needs of all participating institutions through its highly reputed Technology Based Learning Systems (TBLS). Session T4F: Blended Learning Technologies in Engineering Chair: Andres Navarro Cadavid, Universidad Icesi - Colombia Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon E & F A MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT APPROACH TO TEACHING INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMMING Qusay H. Mahmoud and Pawel Popowicz Mobile devices such as smartphones are becoming widely used on university campuses, and as the shape of computing is evolving more into a mobile environment, the programmer of the future will need to be aware of special considerations that need to be taken into account when developing applications for mobile devices. These unique considerations will also assist the programmer to look at traditional application development on desktop platforms from a different perspective and apply some of the strategies in mobile application development to this area. This 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 109 Thursday Sessions paper introduces a new approach for using mobile devices and mobile application development as a mechanism to teaching introductory programming to computer science, information technology, and computer engineering students. We will explore how the mobile device approach to teaching application development could help students to look at special considerations that must be taken into account when dealing with mobile devices while keeping them interested and excited by being on the forefront of technological changes. We provide sample applications that instructors could use as assignments to integrate into their courses. WORK IN PROGRESS - ACHIEVING STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING THROUGH SCALABLE INSTRUCTIONAL ACADEMIC SUPPORT RESOURCES Jia-Ling Lin, Donald C. Woolston and Gregory Moses Our past ten years of experience in undergraduate academic support programs have taught us that understanding student-centered learning requires new perspectives. Whether it is in a traditional lecture or in a newly designed non-traditional course, how well teaching and learning goals are aligned is the key. To further promote student-centered learning for our engineering undergraduates, we have produced online-video modules to strengthen the instructional component of a peer-led problem-solving workshop, the Supplementary Instruction Program. The newly created teaching modules facilitate learning of difficult concepts in traditionally challenging physics and engineering mechanics courses. New understanding of students’ learning challenges has helped peer instructors craft and deliver these modules that reinforce the spirit of true student-centered learning and at the same time make our academic support resources more scalable. EDUCATIONALLY ENHANCED VIRTUAL WORLDS Colin Allison, Alan Miller, Thomas Sturgeon, Ross Nicoll and Indika Perera Virtual worlds continue to attract considerable interest as an innovative means of engaging students through the use of immersive, 3D, collaborative environments. They allow for the dynamic creation of content and for that content to be programmed. Second Life is the dominant virtual world technology in use, and whilst attractive in that it is a ready-made - albeit commercial - service, it was not designed for educational use and has significant social and technical drawbacks when used for that purpose. As such, we have been researching the serious use of OpenSim as an alternative virtual world for Computer Science education. OpenSim is a free, open source software development project which supports self-hosting and maintenance of virtual worlds. This paper explains our rationale for using OpenSim and reports on our experiences to date. It includes a feature comparison between OpenSim and Second Life as an aid for those wishing to exploit virtual worlds in the Computer Science curriculum.

INTERACTIVE ASSIGNMENT: A MOODLE COMPONENT TO ENRICH THE LEARNING PROCESS Patricia Alves Rodrigues, Leonidas de Oliveira Brandao and Anarosa Alves Franco Brandão Nowadays, people are proactive concerning Web-related issues and reasons for that could be explained by the availability of Web systems and the immediate response they provide. The same is also true whenever considering web-based courses. In this context, interactivity and automatic assessment may be responsible for keeping the learners' motivation. Also, these characteristics may promote active learning. Currently, Moodle is one of the most popular Learning Management System (LMS) to support courses through the Web. However, since it is a general system, if the subject to be taught or learnt is related to Mathematics there is a lack of interactive modules to be integrated with LMS in general, Moodle in particular. In this paper we present Interactive Assignment (i-Assign), a package to be integrated into Moodle in order to improve interactivity and promote automatic assessment of interactive activities developed using e-Learning Modules (e-LM). e-LM are interactive Java applets that supports the teaching and learning process of specific subjects and may offer resources for automatic assessment of solved activities, providing instantaneous feedback for learners concerning their performance. WORK IN PROGRESS – PREPARING HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS TO TEACH DESIGN James F. Young We are developing and implementing a comprehensive professional development program for in-service high school teachers to prepare them to teach engineering design and problem solving, and to use design-based teaching approaches in their science curriculum. The program uses a constructionist, immersion pedagogy as part of an unconventional three-phase learning cycle. Pre- and post-test results for the first summer workshop indicate significant gains in understanding the engineering design process among the teachers. WORK IN PROGRESS - RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: STUDENT INTEREST AND LEARNING IN HANDS-ON LABORATORY EXPERIENCES Allen White, Glen Livesay and Kay C. Dee In order to evaluate the impact of hands-on experiences on student learning, the authors developed and delivered five one-hour supplemental learning sessions to a group of approximately 25 students over two consecutive years. During 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 110 Thursday Sessions the sessions, student groups participated in a total of 16 hands-on activities, ranging in length from 5 to 20 minutes each. The primary objective of the activities was to emphasize concepts that students were learning about in a transport phenomena course. Pre- and post-testing indicated that during both years, the sessions helped students learn. In the second year, students were surveyed to attempt to elucidate causes for their engagement levels with the various activities. Student ratings of their interest in an activity and their perception of the learning value of an activity were usually positively correlated. Both student interest and student perception of learning values were positively correlated to improved scores from pre- to post-testing for activities. CONSIDERATIONS ON A PBL-BASED COURSE ON RADIO COMMUNICATIONS: A DECADE'S EXPERIENCE Pedro Ramos and Guillermo Palacios This paper reports outcomes of an investigation into a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) experience carried out throughout the last decade in the context of a non-compulsory course on radio communications at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. The experience is founded on three open-ended projects. There are significant differences in the intrinsic characteristics of the proposed assignments since they are aimed at honing specific skills of the students. A short pre-task questionnaire is handed out among the students to gauge their previous opinion about methodologies and topics addressed. A second survey is distributed among them at the end of the semester to evaluate the level of satisfaction achieved in the development of the project. Considering that data have been collected since 2001, it is possible to analyze trends and changes in the subjective judgments and the objective results. According to the students’ assessment and the lecturers’ experience, efforts to adopt PBL in the laboratory sessions were worth it. Session T4G: Recruitment and Retention of Diverse Students Chair: Randa L. Shehab, University of Oklahoma Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - PROGRAMS FOR RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION OF STEM MAJORS Rafic Bachnak, Rohitha Goonatilake, Edward Chappa and Young Man Kim This paper describes a new program, STEM Recruitment, Retention, and Graduation (STEM-RRG), geared toward increasing the number of low-income minority students pursuing degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. STEM-RRG consists of several projects that implement a number of activities, including enrichment programs, scholarships, internships, research experiences, mentoring and tutoring, advising and career counseling, experiential training, recruitment of high-potential students, and faculty professional development. The paper will briefly describe the overall program and present details about two projects: (a) Pre-engineering Cohort, and (b) Mathematics Enrichment Project. THE ROLE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES IN ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES AT A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE INSTITUTION Julie Martin Trenor, Denise R. Simmons Grant and Everton Archer This paper describes an exploratory constructivist grounded theory study focusing on relationships between students’ perceptions of their participation in an African American fraternity or sorority (i.e. a Black Greek-letter Organization) and their experiences in undergraduate engineering studies. 10 interviews were conducted with students at a Predominantly White Institution in the Southeastern United States. A semi-structured interview guide based on the critical incident technique was used to elicit specific information relative to the research question, and constructivist grounded theory analysis was used to develop a preliminary theory. This study’s significance lies in its unique focus on peer-led Black Greek-letter Organizations as potential influences on students’ educational experiences in engineering. These organizations have rich histories of traditions, including a strong emphasis on high academic standards. Our work augments that of other studies in engineering education which focus on institutionally-run interventions and/or support programs such as minority in engineering programs. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM FRAMEWORK FOR THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE AND COMPETENCES David Vernet, Ruben Nicolas, Elisabet Golobardes, Albert Fornells and Alvaro Garcia-Piquer Even though there are many tutoring systems to help students achieve their goals in terms of theoretical knowledge, as yet there is no system to foment the acquisition of the competences which form an integral part of university degree programs. This issue is crucial because the Higher Education System is changing in Europe. New educational models are being created to introduce competences which correspond specifically to degree programs. In this work-in-progress the general framework to develop an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) based on competences is presented. The system monitorizes the acquisition of theoretical knowledge and also the assessment of the

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 111 Thursday Sessions competences related to the subject and it takes corrective actions when needed to fix a negative evolution of the student. The framework is divided into four main phases based on artificial intelligence techniques: construction, location, prediction and reinforcement. The main feature of the proposed framework is the fact that it promotes the academic development of the student in the future educational context by providing guidance and supervision to ensure the successful acquisition of both theoretical knowledge and the corresponding subject-related competences. WORK IN PROGRESS - ENGAGING STUDENTS IN THERMODYNAMICS WITH ENGINEERING SCENARIOS Patrick A. Tebbe, Stewart Ross and Jeffrey R Pribyl This NSF CCLI Phase II project is focused on addressing improvements in student pedagogy and educational materials for the thermodynamics curriculum. The project intends to complete the development of the “Engineering Scenario” concept as a textbook supplement based on actual engineering facilities and real-world problems. The material is based on an expanded case study format and constructed in a web based format, allowing extensive integration of narrative, pictures, video, and web links to expand the background material. The Phase I project allowed for the development and testing of a single Scenario based on a local plant. Lessons learned from the previous assessment are guiding current development and expansion to include multiple facility types and locations for Phase II. This will be supplemented by input from student focus groups and readability test results. Assessment will occur at multiple institutions and will make use of engagement surveys, concept inventories, and student focus groups. WORK IN PROGRESS - FIRST YEAR RETENTION OF HISPANIC, FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS Denise Martinez, Jason Jacks, Dennis Jones, Brenda Faulkner, Peter Bell, George Mollick and Peter White The “Program to Increase College Opportunities and Successes” (PICOS) is an NSF S-STEM funded initiative to increase the number of Hispanic, first-generation, financially needy students in Math, Chemistry, Engineering, and Engineering Technology using scholarship funds and academic success initiatives. This program recruited two cohorts of freshmen: the first in fall 2008, the second in fall 2009. A variety of efforts from different areas of campus were brought together into a single, sustainable academic success initiative. These efforts include a bridge program, block scheduling, faculty mentoring, evening tutor sessions, and academic advising. These promote an academic learning community as well as a collegial relationship between student and faculty mentors. The regular interactions with the students facilitate monitoring of student performance so student with academic difficulties can be counseled closely on overcoming their deficit. Many of these efforts will continue throughout the students’ academic careers. This paper will describe the literature associated with academic success initiatives in STEM and this demographic, as well as how the wide range of initiatives were consolidated under a single umbrella to achieve retention goal of 74%. RACE, GENDER AND FIRST GENERATION STATUS IN COMPUTING SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND MATH PERSISTENCE Mary Virnoche and Elizabeth A Eschenbach The NSF sponsored Scientific Leadership Scholars (SLS) program at Humboldt State University (HSU) provides scholarships to a diverse cohort of students in Computing Science, Environmental Resources Engineering or Mathematics. The program targeted financially eligible Native American and first generation students. The SLS group persisting into year three remained more diverse than earlier corresponding major cohorts: 22 (59%) were either women and/or underrepresented minority (URM) students in STEM. In the 2007-08 academic year, 36 Cohort 1 students entered the program. Of the Cohort 1 freshmen, 23 (66%) persisted into their second year and 12 (33%) persisted into their third year as SLS majors. White and Asian Cohort 1 students were more likely to persist than STEM URM students (47%, n= 8 compared to 21%, n=4). In 2008-09, 15 additional SLS students were added. Of these students, 12 (80%) persisted into their third year as an SLS major. While all white students (6) in Cohort 2 persisted, 67% (6) of the underrepresented students persisted. All 4 women in Cohort 2 persisted. There was no significant difference in the persistence based on gender or first generation status. Recommendations are included. Session T4H: Engineering Design Experiences I Chair: Asad Azemi, The Pennsylvania State University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon H WORK IN PROGRESS - A MIXED-METHODS STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF FIRST-YEAR PROJECT PEDAGOGIES ON THE MOTIVATION, RETENTION, AND CAREER PLANS OF WOMEN IN ENGINEERING Marie Paretti, Brett D. Jones, Holly Matusovich and Jacob Moore Our research project compares two first-year engineering course project pedagogies to identify approaches that

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 112 Thursday Sessions enhance the likelihood of women continuing in engineering majors and entering engineering careers. Specifically, we compare the problem-based learning (PBL) model to a more general experiential learning approach centered on the engineering design process, referred to here as the traditional engineering design model (TED). We hypothesize that the PBL model, with extensive faculty facilitation, will increase the likelihood of women persisting in an engineering degree, achieving higher grades in future classes, and going into engineering careers. Our research is grounded in motivational theory, and particularly in a model that integrates aspects of existing theories including participation-identification, expectancy-value, and self-efficacy. We are testing this integrated model and the research hypothesis through a longitudinal, mixed-method analysis, with data collected from five cohorts at two large research universities. WORK IN PROGRESS - UNDERSTANDING DESIGN FIXATION: A SUNK COST PERSPECTIVE ON INNOVATION Vimal K. Viswanathan and Julie S. Linsey In the current competitive world, engineers must be innovative to be competitive and these skills must be taught. Physical representation is a likely tool to assist in being innovative. Guidelines do not exist for when physical representation should be implemented in the design process. Past studies provide conflicting results on the effects of physical representations on cognition. An observational study of an industrial team shows that physical representations could cause design fixation. In contract, a controlled lab study conducted by the authors failed to reproduce this result. One possible explanation is the sunk cost theory from behavioral economics, which states that people show the tendency to continue with the chosen path based on the amount of time, money and effort already put in. The controlled lab experiment used a fairly simple design problem whereas the other study contained a more complex design problem, thus the observed differences in apparent design fixation could be due to the sunk cost effect. This work in progress paper investigates sunk cost as an explanation for the result differences. This paper proposes an experiment to test the sunk cost effect with physical representation and discusses the future work along with possible implications of the results.

WORK IN PROGRESS- USE-VALUE AND FUNCTIONALITY VERSUS AESTHETICS AND EXPERIENCE: INCULCATION OF DESIGN IDEOLOGIES IN ENGINEERING AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN STUDENTS Andrea Goncher, Aditya Johri and Akshay Sharma This paper compares how different student teams with engineering and industrial design backgrounds approach design problems and create design solutions. We collected data by observing team meetings throughout the design process. While students in both disciplines were essentially designing solutions for clients’ future needs, the design prompts were vastly different as was their subsequent approach. Preliminary results show engineering teams designed solutions based on the project requirements, issues of ultimate functionality, and client needs or interpretations of client needs while industrial designers focused on positive user reaction and aesthetics, working around ideas that incorporated unique or creative components to enhance the overall appearance’s appeal. In this study we found preliminary evidence that innovation occurs when the designer also takes on the role of the user; here the designer incorporates personal experience with cognitive tools to search the solution space for creative solutions. WORK IN PROGRESS - ENCOURAGING INNOVATION BY HAVING STUDENTS DEVELOP THEIR OWN COURSE DESIGN PROJECTS Allen H. Hoffman Project based design courses incorporating realization have an important role in the education of engineering students. Instructor supplied design projects allow students to develop creative solutions. However, these projects largely bypass or eliminate the innovative part of the design process related to recognizing and developing the need for the design. In 2008 the format for an intermediate level design course was changed so that the student teams became responsible for developing their own design projects. In addition, team members became individually accountable for different phases of the project. Some refinements to the format were introduced in 2009. A typical project statement is to ask students to design a new device to assist elderly persons with a disability. The resulting student developed projects have been of high quality and it has been recommended that several of the groups file invention disclosures with the university. Student course evaluations strongly support this new approach. WORK IN PROGRESS - DESIGN IN FIRST YEAR ENGINEERING Tiffany Veltman and William (Bill) Rosehart This paper examines first year (freshman) design experiences. The work described in this paper evaluates various approaches to design education taken by engineering institutions across North America. Additionally, this paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches to design education, particularly in the context of the first year design experience within the Schulich School of Engineering (University of Calgary), by comparing the 2002

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 113 Thursday Sessions two-course design experience and the 2010 revised single-course experience. Finally, this paper highlights the successes of the single-course experience, and describes future steps that will be taken in the course design. A METHOD FOR ANALYZING LEARNING OUTCOMES IN PROJECT COURSES Mattias Wiggberg Including projects in courses is widely recognized as important in preparing students for their profession. These courses are however quite complex with often contradictory ideas about how to actually run them in order to reach the learning objectives. This paper presents parts of a larger study where desired learning outcomes are contrasted against collected experiences from students. Session T4J: Special Session - It’s A Safari Out There: An Allegory for Learning to Navigate Academia Chair: Euan D Lindsay, Curtin University Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm Salon J SPECIAL SESSION - IT’S A SAFARI OUT THERE: AN ALLEGORY FOR LEARNING TO NAVIGATE ACADEMIA Euan D. Lindsay and Kurt Paterson One of the key challenges at the beginning of an academic career is learning to live in the university working environment. Interactions between academics can be significantly different to those found in industry; and whilst many of the drivers for the organisation are similar, there are also some aspects that are unique to a university. Being able to successfully navigate through the office politics is exceptionally valuable to academic staff, both new and established. In order to do this, it is essential to understand what motivates both yourself and your colleagues. This workshop will use an African Safari as a metaphor for the academic working environment, allocating animals to represent some of the archetypes that are present within an Engineering department.

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Friday Matrix

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 115 Friday Sessions

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 116 Friday Sessions Friday Sessions Session F1A: Special Session - Improvisation Methods to Catalyze Engineering Creativity Chair: Pete Ludovice, Georgia Institute of Technology Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon A SPECIAL SESSION - IMPROVISATION METHODS TO CATALYZE ENGINEERING CREATIVITY Peter Ludovice, Lew Lefton and Richard Catrambone Numerous organizations, including the National Science Board and the National Academy of Engineering recognize the importance of creativity and innovation in the Engineering field. However, there is very little activity focused on systematically inserting these important concepts into engineering design and engineering education. The proposed workshop utilizes a systematic approach that is currently part of an ongoing research project to develop a protocol for engineering innovation and implement this in the engineering classroom. This protocol uses humorous improvisation techniques to generate technical design solutions. It uses improvisation as a random idea generator as a random number generator is often used in stochastic simulation. Unlike previous applications of improvisation to innovation, this protocol is suitable to technical applications because it utilizes an additional step to produce technical solutions from random improvised ideas. The workshop is intended for engineers or engineering students that wish to increase the innovativeness of their engineering design. It is also intended for engineering educators who wish to incorporate this innovation protocol into their design courses. Session F1B: Panel - Models of Entrepreneurship Education and its Role in Increasing Creativity, Innovation and Leadership in Computer Science and Engineering Students Chair: Simona Doboli, Hofstra University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon B PANEL - MODELS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND ITS ROLE IN INCREASING CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND LEADERSHIP IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS Simona Doboli, Wendy Tang, Rajiv Ramnath, John Impagliazzo, Tim VanEpps, Ankur Agarwal, Rodrigo Romero and Edward H. Currie Creativity, innovation and leadership are among the essential attributes of future engineers as identified in the Engineer 2020 report by the National Academy of Engineering. It is critical for students to have the ability to identify new needs and opportunities for technological innovation in highly complex and inter-disciplinary domains. Historically, entrepreneurship has fueled innovation and the advent of many technological advances. Therefore, education in entrepreneurship for engineering or computing disciplines that complement strong analytical and technical skills, is likely to significantly enhance students’ lifelong ability and desire to innovate. The goal of this panel is to discuss a number of education models in entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership at different types of computing and engineering schools across the country and internationally, in order to identify common themes and effective components for such programs. Session F1C: New Innovations in Engineering Capstone and Design Courses Chair: Salamah Salamah, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - RESTRUCTURING ONLINE CAPSTONE COURSES IN PARTNERSHIP WITH INDUSTRY FOR PROFESSIONAL SCIENCE MASTER'S (PSM) RECOGNITION Irena Bojanova and Rana Khan The procedures and challenges for acquiring a PSM designation for online programs are introduced. The approaches for creating partnerships with industry and restructuring the capstone courses, developed by the Biotechnology and Telecommunications Management PSM programs at University of Maryland University College, are presented. The significance of the newly designed capstone courses, their integration with virtual internships, the expected outcomes, and the preliminary results are discussed. Innovative use of technology, recommended teaching strategies, and lessons learned by program directors and industry liaisons are shared.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 117 Friday Sessions INCREASING ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT THROUGH THE CAPSTONE EXPERIENCE Gerald C. Gannod, Kristen M. Bachman, Steve D. Brockman and Douglas A. Troy The capstone is meant to provide graduating seniors with a culminating experience that ties together the knowledge and skills that have been attained over the duration of a four-year curriculum. While there are many different styles of capstone projects, there is a recent trend towards offering service learning projects that allow students to apply their skills in a context that is a benefit to the community. In many instances, students are responsible for a wide variety of activities including fund raising, engineering, and marketing. At Miami University in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, we have begun a new initiative called the "Leaders in Transition Partnership" which is meant to 1) give students, faculty and external advisors the opportunity to work as a team to design, develop and deliver a product or system that will help the community and society as a whole, 2) promote and develop leadership across all stakeholders of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 3) Re-engage alumni and other external advisors with the SEAS students and faculty in an innovative and socially responsible way. This paper describes how the partnership is developed, operated, and maintained. INTEGRATING DEVELOPMENTAL INSTRUCTION IN SUSTAINABILITY CONTEXTS INTO AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING DESIGN CURRICULUM: LEVEL ONE Eric Pappas and Olga Pierrakos Developmental instruction in four sustainability contexts (environmental, social, economic, technical) in an engineering design curriculum offers a strong foundation and framework upon which to build an engineering program that teaches students the necessary methodologies for designing for sustainability. Instruction in sustainability contexts described in the current paper employs a developmental approach using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives which is a way to classify instructional activities or questions as they progress in cognitive difficulty. Our objective in this paper and presentation is to detail an instructional methodology (and results of a case study assessment) that integrates sustainability instruction in four contexts into the first of our six-course design curriculum using a developmental approach.

ENGINEERING STUDENT-DESIGN COMPETITION TEAMS: CAPSTONE OR EXTRACURRICULAR? Sami Khorbotly and Khalid S. Al-Olimat Year after year, engineering student-design competitions continue to attract increasing attention from engineering programs across the country. The participation in these competitions is beneficial to both students trying to develop their design and networking abilities, and institutions trying to promote their programs and increase their visibility. Traditionally, the perception has been that the easiest, most straight forward way to participate in a student-design competition is to assign the competition project as a capstone senior design project. This way, a group of seniors work under the supervision of a faculty member to complete the project seeing that the completion is a graduation requirement. The recently emerging alternative is to form an extracurricular team of students whose goal is to exclusively participate in the competition. The extracurricular teams are mostly populated by sophomore and junior level students and driven only by their passion and self motivation rather than a curricular requirement. In this paper, we share our observation and experience to contrast both options and provide some recommendations. CONTROL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR UNDERGRADUATE EXPOSURE Trever J. Hassell, Aurenice M. Oliveira and Wayne W. Weaver The more “real world” exposure students get on all aspects of control system development the better prepared they will be to quickly adapt to product development in industry. Undergraduate student involvement in automotive hybrid development competitions, such as EcoCAR, exposes them to areas that they usually not see in typical undergraduate controls courses. EcoCAR design competition exposes them to a product development experience very similar to what they would see in industry. This paper will discuss the benefits obtained by undergraduate students and industry sponsors participating in design competitions such as EcoCAR. The student exposure experienced in the competition includes a complete system architecture selection and design, control strategy development, both high and low level control code generation, in the loop testing, and product validation. The students also have the opportunity to interface with professionals from the sponsor companies guiding them on use of state-of-the-art industry engineering tools and techniques.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 118 Friday Sessions Session F1D: Introductory Courses II Chair: David Voltmer, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS - A CONCEPT MAP FOR MECHANICS OF MATERIALS Carla J. Egelhoff, Nathan Podoll and Kassim Tarhini The Mechanics of Materials course is fundamental to all areas of solid mechanics in engineering. It is commonly a "gatekeeper" course and generally considered "difficult" by students. Educators across several engineering disciplines have attempted to improve learning through efforts such as: developing physical demonstration models for classroom use, writing computer programs for independent learning, and conducting concept inventory studies to uncover the underlying cause of learning difficulty. This paper describes the development of a Concept Map for Mechanics of Materials. The map serves as the focal point for discussions and questions, and is simple enough so that anyone can re-create its salient features as a hand-drawn sketch. This concept map has been used and assessed as a tool to review the Mechanics of Materials course before administering a gateway exam in the next-level course, and as a tool for the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam review course. Preliminary assessment results indicate this concept map is an effective tool to use for teaching or reviewing Mechanics of Materials. WORK IN PROGRESS - USING VIDEO PHENOMENOGRAPHY TO INVESTIGATE PROBLEM SOLVING SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN COMPUTER SCIENCE I Carol A. Wellington, Rebecca Ward and Alice Armstrong Measuring the maturation of students’ problem solving skills in Computer Science I has been a difficult problem, often tackled through assessment exams. These exams generate a snapshot of student progress before and after an entire course, but do not reveal how the students learn from one day to the next. This limited data provides a scant array of tools for assessment and for the development of future courses. We employ a new technique for capturing student development in vivo called Video Phenomenography (VP), which is based on the classic method commonly used in educational psychology and utilizes videos of the students while they are working on a programming problem. Early experiments have shown that this technique can highlight differences in the problem solving strategies of students and provide feedback on the success and pitfalls of a pedagogical strategy. A NON-LINEAR APPROACH TO SOLVING LINEAR ALGORITHMIC PROBLEMS Orna Muller and Bruria Haberman Solving algorithmic problems and implementing them in code is a major theme in introductory computer science courses. Problems related to string manipulation are common and of great importance in various domains. In the context of computer science education, solving algorithmic problems of this type may be very challenging for novices, even for the more competent students. Analysis of novice students' solutions to a specific class of problems dealing with string manipulation revealed that a widespread intuitive and non-linear approach was used to solve these problems, which led to cumbersome and erroneous solutions. On the other hand, a straightforward linear approach that leads to shorter and more elegant solutions is uncommon. Uncovering students' common and unsatisfactory approaches in problem solving have significant implications on instruction.

WORK IN PROGRESS - A PROOF-OF-CONCEPT PROTOTYPE OF A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM FOR COURSE INSTRUCTIONS AND LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS Wookwon Lee and Sreeramachandra Mutya In electrical and computer engineering, communications is an interesting but challenging area of study for undergraduate students. To improve the quality of learning and understanding of the basic principles of communications, we have been developing a proof-of-concept prototype of a 2.4 GHz communication system as a framework of laboratory experiments suitable for undergraduate students. The framework primarily consists of a small mesh network of mobile robots realized in hardware and software and analog beamforming realized with off-the-shelf hardware components. In this Work-in-Progress paper, we describe our prototype under development and highlight key functionalities of the prototype that will eventually appear as specific contents of laboratory experiments in the near future. From the progress so far, we have observed that development of our proof-of-concept communication system, initially for research in indoor positioning technologies, is suitable for laboratory experiment for a semester-long communications course for upper-division undergraduate students.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 119 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - PETRI NETS AS APPLIED TO THE MODELING OF E-LEARNING COOPERATIVE SYSTEMS Daniel Capelo Borges, Hermínio Borges Neto and José Neuman de Souza In this work we demonstrate the use of Petri Nets as applied to the interaction in a Collaborative Environment in the educational context, particularly E-learning. The scenarios and models proposed in this paper have been studied and applied to TeleMeios, an e-learning platform in the Multimeios Research Laboratory of the School of Education, at the Federal University of Ceará. TeleMeios is a unique tool which supports E-learning, as the professor becomes the main element (instead of the computational resources), acting at the core of the educational process, in order to better understand the existing methods and behavior of the system. This study also highlights the importance of mediation in the educational process. Session F1E: Projects Approaches and Engagement/Effectiveness Issues in EE/CS/CIS Chair: David Benson, Kettering University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon K RED LIGHT-GREEN LIGHT: USING A MODEL-ELICITING ACTIVITY IN A LOGIC DESIGN COURSE Eric W. Johnson and Tamara J. Moore This paper outlines the use of a Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA) in a logic design course that introduces students to design through an authentic client-driven problem. The MEA involved creating a model of a traffic signal controller for an intersection of a U.S. highway and a county road near the university. Students were given background information on traffic signal controllers and actual traffic flow data for the intersection and were then asked to analyze the data, transform the problem to the digital design space, and create a state diagram for a traffic signal controller that would be effective for the given intersection. The results using the MEA in the course were very encouraging. All seven groups in the class created valid traffic signal controller state diagrams and six of the seven groups were able to create working implementations in a programmable logic device. In addition, on the course’s final exam, a similar modeling problem was included and the students who participated in the MEA scored higher on the problem than last year’s students that did not have the MEA experience.

ENHANCING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN AN INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMMING COURSE Arnold N. Pears Adopting a scholarly approach to teaching and learning and the instructional design of tertiary courses has gained increasing popularity in recent years. A programming course case study is used to demonstrate how research results on the teaching and learning of programming, can be used to inform instructional design of an introductory programming course. WORK IN PROGRESS - DESIGNING AND BUILDING A MINI SUPERCOMPUTER TO IMPROVE PARALLEL PROCESSING INSTRUCTION Stephen W. Turner It is well documented that computer science education is improved with greater student involvement through interesting practical exercises. Many studies exemplify this through their use of hands-on programming activities with physical objects, such as robots, to illustrate important concepts. It is also known that interest in computer science has recently waned, and more specifically, interest in parallel processing has decreased greatly since its zenith in the early 1990s. Simultaneously, recent developments in computer architecture underline the future importance of parallel processing, and the popular press continually reports on the great need for more IT graduates in general. Past studies suggest that intrinsic motivation for given tasks can improve creativity. This paper presents a work-in-progress study, in which specific practical exercises were examined for their effectiveness at improving the motivation level of students, leading to greater creativity and interest in participation in a parallel processing class. The exercises involved the design and construction of a low-cost supercomputer using off-the-shelf components. IMPLEMENTING COLLABORATIVE PROJECT-BASED LEARNING USING THE TABLET PC TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES Zanj Avery, Mauricio Castillo, Huiping Guo, Jiang Guo, Nancy Warter-Perez, Deborah S. Won and Jane Dong Increasing the retention rate of engineering/ computer science students and enhancing student design skills are two major challenges in engineering education. This paper presents a team effort to implement Collaborative Project-based Learning (CPBL) using Tablet PC technology in a broad spectrum of engineering and computer science courses from freshman to senior level. Presented here are a number of innovative teaching strategies to create a more friendly and interactive learning environment to address the aforementioned challenges for minority students.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 120 Friday Sessions Since Fall 2009, eight innovative pilot courses have been designed and conducted. Assessment results revealed that the implementation of Tablet PC based CPBL had brought transformational changes to the traditional engineering classrooms to support student centered-learning. The paper also describes the impact of Tablet PC based teaching strategy on lecture styles, teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes from both the faculty and students’ perspectives. IMPROVING LEARNING EFFECTIVENESS WITH HANDS-ON DESIGN LABS AND COURSE PROJECTS FOR THE OPERATING MODEL OF A PIPELINED PROCESSOR Bo Hatfield and Lan Jin In teaching Computer Organization and Architecture courses, one of the major topics that reflect the techniques of high-performance processors is the analysis and design of high-performance pipelined processors. It covers three interrelated areas: computer architecture, computer organization and implementation. In the context of computer architecture, a pipelined processor works on the principle of exploiting instruction-level parallelism inside the pipeline and exploiting thread-level parallelism among multiple concurrently operating pipelines of a superscalar processor. During the study of computer organization and implementation, students often find it is difficult to understand (1) the operation of an instruction pipeline in its complicated space-time relationships of running an instruction stream over multiple stages of the pipeline, (2) the extensive existence of various types of data and control hazards among instructions, and (3) the distributed control mechanism of handling variable latencies of operations. To help students overcome these difficulties, we designed and developed a series of laboratory activities that were put together into a course project for the design and implementation of an operating model of a pipelined processor. Our multi-year experiences show that these activities and the course project significantly improved students’ hands-on experience and understanding of the principle of operation of computer pipelines. Session F1F: Enhancing Communication and Teaming Skills: Innovative Techniques and Assessment Chair: Rose Scripa, University of Alabama at Birmingham Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon E & F ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS' LEARNING EXPERIENCE IN AN ORAL COMMUNICATION COURSE AT MIT FOR EECS MAJORS Ruldolph Mitchell and Tony L. Eng Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) majors at MIT are required to take an oral communications course that teaches oral presentation skills and other professional skills that students will need to be effective in the workplace. In this paper, we describe an assessment of the oral presentation skills component of this course performed during the Spring 2009 semester. This assessment consisted of two instruments: (1) a class survey of 71 enrolled students (with 60 respondents or an 85% response rate) and (2) student interviews in which 7 out of 10 randomly-selected individuals participated. The findings from both were consistent and positive: students were enthusiastic about the course, found it useful and viewed the experience positively. INFUSED COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN AN ENGINEERING CURRICULUM David Vampola, Kristen Eichhorn, Cara Thompson, Fritz Messere and Rachid Manseur Among the important ABET mandated aspects of any engineering program is the incorporation of communication skills in the curriculum. This article discusses some of the research results obtained by a team of faculty members tasked with the goal of infusing communication skills in a new electrical and computer engineering program under development. This program is project-based and includes innovative and multidisciplinary aspects in its curriculum. The results presented here include the development of a modern technical writing course, the integration of communication skills into engineering materials, and multidisciplinary methods that partner students enrolled in the Arts, Media, and Communication Studies with Engineering teams. In addition, data collected from the students will be used to help understand the role that communication plays in the design and manufacture of products. The outcomes of this externally funded research are useful to engineering programs but they can also be adapted to other disciplines where communication skills play an important role. ENGINEERING BASED MODELING ACTIVITIES FOR ENHANCING STUDENT COMMUNICATION AND TEAMWORK SKILLS Nicholas Mousoulides This paper argues for a future-oriented, inclusion of engineering modeling activities in introductory engineering courses at the university level. Engineering model eliciting activities provide a rich source of meaningful engineering problem situations that capitalise on and extend students’ existing mathematics and engineering learning and provide

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 121 Friday Sessions opportunities for enhancing student communication and teamwork skills. We give consideration here to engineering modeling activities as a means for providing freshmen students with opportunities to work with real world engineering problems even in introductory courses, to develop their communication and teamwork skills, to develop and revise powerful models and to document and present their solutions. The models developed by a class of 26 first year civil engineering students in solving the Natural Gas activity are presented here. Results showed that students, working in groups, created models that adequately solved the engineering problem, and developed their communication skills. Finally, recommendations for implementing engineering modeling activities and for further research are presented. CONTEXTUALIZING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ENGINEERING CLASSROOM Elaine P. Scott, Rebecca Bates, Ryan C. Campbell and Denise Wilson A lack of professional development opportunities has been reported as a significant reason for choosing to drop out of the engineering major at the undergraduate level. To address this issue, nine professional development course modules were developed and placed into the context of a number of different engineering courses. Several aspects of professional development were addressed, including engineering education in the context of overall educational goals, professional communication, career building strategies, and learning and personality styles as they relate to engineering. The modules were first implemented in a professional development intervention course, and then exported to several gateway engineering courses at three universities. Assessment of the professional development intervention course indicated substantial, statistically significant increases in the students’ meta-cognitive awareness of the professional world. In two of the four first-time offerings of the gateway courses, aggregate results showed that integrating the professional development modules into these courses provided significant improvements in student awareness (meta-cognition) of the professional world.

SELF-MANAGED TEAMING AND TEAM EFFECTIVENESS IN INTERDISCIPLINARY CAPSTONE DESIGN Kahyun Kim and Lisa D. McNair The purpose of this paper is to present results from an interdisciplinary design course that utilized an inquiry-based approach to guide students in producing “smart” safety equipment for firefighters. This study explores the benefits and challenges of promoting interdisciplinarity through self-managed teaming. The participants included 12 students in an interdisciplinary capstone design course, with 4 each from electrical and computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing. The course was designed so that students self-managed their teams in an inquiry-based learning mode with the objective of designing safety equipment for firefighters that utilizes “smart” technology. The researchers observed and video-recorded each class and administered the Team Diagnostic Survey and concept map activities. Results indicated that students benefited from the self-managed teaming and also encountered various challenges in this project-based course, but they were able to succeed in both product design and crossing disciplinary boundaries. Recommendations for interdisciplinary teaming pedagogy are discussed. Session F1G: Assessment Chair: Jenefer Husman, Arizona State University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon G A ONE YEAR EMPIRICAL STUDY OF STUDENT PROGRAMMING BUGS Renee C. Bryce, Alison Cooley, Amy Hansen and Nare Hayrapetyan Students in introductory Computer Science courses often have difficulty with coding and problem solving which results in bugs. These bugs cause both student frustration and attrition of many of our CS majors. In this work, we seek to understand the problems that students believe they cannot solve on their own and for which they ask tutors for assistance. We collect and analyze 450 bugs that were brought to our tutor lab by our CS1 and CS2 students over a one year period. The results show that approximately 22% of the problems are due to problem solving skills, while the remaining problems involve a combination of logic and syntax problems for specific topics in the courses. WORK IN PROGRESS - ASSESSING THE DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERTISE IN UNDERGRADUATE COMPUTER ENGINEERING STUDENTS Marcia R. Friesen and Robert D. McLeod While there is a significant body of literature on the development of expertise generally, much less is written on the development of expertise in engineering specifically. The purpose of this research is to examine the nature and scope of students’ expertise in two computer engineering courses. Data are collected via no-grade assignments administered in-class approximately 10 times in each course. The assignments probe into students’ ways of organizing information, deciding on contexts of applicability of the subject matter, and creating analogies to other concepts.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 122 Friday Sessions Data obtained from the first course have undergone preliminary analysis; full analysis will occur in summer 2010 when the second course has ended. Preliminary findings indicate rudimentary characteristics of routine expertise with no significant markers of adaptive expertise evident in the data to date. The study is also an example of the viability of non-intrusive classroom-based engineering education research that yields meaningful insights. ASSESSING INDIAN AUTONOMOUS INSTITUTIONS USING AHP APPROACH – A CASE STUDY Alka Kulkarni, M. S. Moodithaya and Narasimha H Ayachit In India, only around 250 institutions are autonomous while 98.9% are affiliated with universities. The Government of India realizing the importance of autonomy for educational institutions is encouraging educational institutions to be autonomous, as the only safe and better way to improve the quality of undergraduate education is to delink most of the institutions from the affiliating structure. Different institutions including private are opting to be autonomous. Granting autonomy is one major issue under Indian context and so also monitoring such institutions. If this assessment is not administered appropriately, it could lead to disasters in the field of education. Hence this paper proposes a rationalized method for monitoring the grant and review of autonomous institutions using the modified method of Analytical Hierarchy Process based on criteria like Academic program outcomes, Faculty qualifications & achievements, Adequacy of infrastructure, Students performance and results, Quality and responsiveness of institution Management etc. A PRELIMINARY PEDAGOGICAL COMPARISON STUDY USING THE DIGITAL LOGIC CONCEPT INVENTORY Geoffrey L. Herman and Joseph Handzik Digital logic instructors have created a myriad of new, innovative teaching methods. Comparing the effectiveness of these methods is elusive because of differences in topic coverage and assessment content. We have created a standardized assessment tool to provide a means to directly compare student conceptual learning in different digital logic design courses – the Digital Logic Concept Inventory (DLCI). We have used the DLCI along with instructor interviews and analysis of student final exams to compare student learning in two courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These courses differed in course content, teaching philosophy, and pedagogical technology. We provide evidence that the DLCI can provide useful insight into what techniques and methods improve student learning.

WORK IN PROGRESS - AN EVIDENCE-BASED INTERVENTION SYSTEM TO ENHANCE ENGINEERING EDUCATION Donald L. McEachron, Mustafa Sualp, Elisabeth Papazoglou and Fred Allen A major difficulty in assessment is the problem known as ‘closing the loop’ –ensuring that assessment data is used effectively for program improvement and to enhance student learning. There are a number of reasons why current assessment procedures do not always succeed at this necessary phase of the process. First and foremost is that assessment has been tied to accreditation and viewed by many faculty and administrators as a necessary evil to be dealt with as little expenditure of time and effort as possible. As long as some program changes can be linked to the assessment process –thus satisfying the external accreditors—the bulk of the data being collected can be safely ignored. A second factor is the data itself. In order for the assessment process to be effective, the right kind of data must be collected in the right amount. However, there seems little consensus as to the kind and amount of data to collect. Finally, the nature of faculty instruction in higher education can itself be an impediment. Faculty instructors are often unaware of how their particular courses fit into the overall curriculum, beyond vague knowledge of what pre-requisite courses should have been taught. Session F1H: Graduate Curricula and Programs Chair: Ana T. Torres-Ayala, University of South Florida Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon H IMPLEMENTATION OF SOFTWARE RESIDENCY AT A GRADUATION COURSE José Augusto Fabri, Alexandre L’Erário, Luiz Carlos Begosso, Luiz Ricardo Begosso and Fernando Cesar Lima This paper presents the implementation of Software Residency at a graduation course focused in Software Development and Management in a Software Factory. Software Residency follows the same line of medical residency, at a medicine course. In this case, software residency has the objective to promote experience for students, inside a software development real environment, with well defined quality policies and with the goal to promote the dissemination of software quality, project management and production process concepts. In this course, the student actively participates on a software development project at a standard software factory (located in the university) or at

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 123 Friday Sessions some company previously selected by the university. We will present the qualitative and quantitative results of the experience we had conducting the graduation course focused in Software Development and Management in a Software Factory. The course was taken in 2008 and 2009 at a Brazilian public university. The objective of the course was to provide complementary knowledge to the students in the areas of Information Technology, Software Engineering and Project Management, focusing on software residency inside a software factory environment. TELL/MAKE/ENGAGE: ACTIONS FOR INNOVATION Barbara A. Karanian and Gregory L. Kress This paper describes the development of the Tell/Make/Engage (TME) method and storytelling techniques inspired by teaching graduate engineering and design students. The TME method is intended for use during the exploration, discovery and prototyping phases of the design process. It has also been applied as a research tool to understand group engagement in a collaborative industry/academia environment. By telling stories you make connections, develop new ideas and move your design process forward. The TME method makes explicit those emotional factors of design that otherwise remain unexpressed. It provides ways for codifying the impact of a story and understanding how this contributes to real progress. Drawing upon established methods in applied psychology, the TME method reflectively employs imagination, episodic memory, emotion in motivation, sensation and perception to paint a picture of future discovery. Storytelling can create a common vision by capturing truth. The context is based on analysis of four class prototypes and 2 seminar iterations. Implications for further work and appropriate uses of the approach for engineering education are discussed. ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT EDUCATION POST GFC AND COPENHAGEN: ARE WE ON THE RIGHT TRACK? Steven Goh and Frank Bullen As world leaders around the globe navigate around the global financial crisis (GFC) and climate change agendas, aspiring engineering and engineering educators must rethink the enabling pathways for the personal, professional and educational development of professional engineering managers. A call for reform has exhibited in the early 21st century in form of numerous reports and literature around the globe. However, a revisit may now be required to ensure that the recommendations remain valid in the education of the next generation of engineering managers. The paper looks to the latest literature to review the findings of those pre GFC reports and highlights some of the existing engineering management and leadership programs around the world. It comments on the adequacy of those programs post GFC and provides a clearer picture of the key components and pathways of an aspiring engineering manager's learning journey. The issues that educators need address within course and program design are identified and discussed. PURSUING AN ENGINEERING DOCTORATE: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF THE COMBINED BS/MS PROGRAM Erin Crede and Maura Borrego The past several years have seen an increase in hybrid degree programs for upper-class engineering students. These programs have many names, such as dual degree, five year program, and combined BS/MS programs. Structurally, these programs take many forms as well, including: support programs, professional development seminars, and opportunities for students to take graduate courses during the senior year of their undergraduate program. Various universities utilize these programs differently, attempting to increase underrepresented populations in graduate school, providing a graduate option for students who may not otherwise attend graduate school, or targeting students who might make excellent candidates for doctoral study. While universities have assessed their programs individually, there remains a need to develop a broader understanding of the motivation, recruiting practices, and purpose of these programs. In this paper we present a content analysis of public descriptions of existing programs, specifically with respect to their stated purpose and goals with the aim of contextualizing the variety of programs nationally. WORK IN PROGRESS - CREATING INDUSTRY READY PH.D. GRADUATES Joy Watson, Catherine White and Jed Lyons The broad objective of this research is to investigate how engineering doctoral programs can better prepare graduates for careers in industry. Currently, less than 20% of engineering Ph.D. graduates work in academia. Preliminary results indicate that industry values research and leadership skills in their Ph.D. employees. Research skills can be categorized as experimental, computational or general research skills. In order to conduct research groups, Ph.D.s need interpersonal, visionary and lifelong learning leadership skills. With lifelong learning leadership skills, Ph.D.s can learn the business skills and discipline specific technical knowledge that is also valued by industry. Future work will indicate how doctoral programs are developing the knowledge, attributes and skills valued by industry and the

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 124 Friday Sessions attitudes and perceptions of potential Ph.D. candidates towards industry valued knowledge, attributes and skills. Session F1J: Global Issues in Engineering I Chair: J. Fernando Naveda, Rochester Institute of Technology Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon J USING AN IMS-LD BASED QUESTIONNAIRE TO CREATE ADAPTIVE LEARNING PATHS Ana-Elena Guerrero-Roldán, Iván García-Torà, Josep Prieto-Blázquez and Julià Minguillón According to the Bologna process, learners should to be able to acquire and develop their competences in a real scenario. This means that the learning process has to evolve from contents to activities for promoting skills and abilities, considering learner profile and background. In order to provide learners with a personalized learning path, we have created a useful tool to help teachers with learner profile information. This tool is an online questionnaire based on the IMS Learning Design specification and helps learners to select the most suitable learning path for their learning process. In this paper we describe the problems for implementing such a tool and its use in a pilot experience involving subjects with previous competence requirements. WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS SUSTAINABILITY KNOWLEDGE (ASK) IN ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Ranjani Rao, Alice L. Pawley, Stephen R Hoffmann, Matthew W. Ohland and Monica E. Cardella Current engineering students will practice in a world of global climate change with reduced resources, in the context of an increasing global population and a desire to achieve social equity. In short, they will work in a world where sustainability is key to engineering practice. However, there is neither consensus on a set of sus-tainability concepts on which to base an engineering cur-riculum nor a standardized mechanism for assessing stu-dent learning. Engineering educators lack rigorous as-sessment tools to judge the success of sustainability edu-cation. Development of an assessment-oriented knowledge framework can help engineering faculty identify and structure sustainability-related content, develop methods to incorporate these concepts into the curriculum, and assess students’ learning of sustainability concepts. This paper discusses preliminary results of a project designed to develop a research-derived model for curricular development on a critical topic for future engineers’ education.

TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: A DISTANCE EDUCATION EXPERIENCE Mariana Romão Nascimento, Andréa Pereira Mendonça, Dalton Dario Serey Guerreiro and Jorge César Abrantes de Figueiredo Recently, in spite of the growing demand worldwide for professionals in computing, statistic data have revealed a decreasing number of students taking up this area. Given the importance of this field to economic growth and technological development, it is essential to support actions which will encourage students to consider computing as a career. In this article, we describe an experience with a distance programming course given to Brazilian high school students. The results showed that 94% of the students that completed the course were successful in the exams. The dropout rate in this course was high, mainly because students were young, and had difficulties in self-management of their activities. This work brings important contributions: it develops programming and problem solving skills in high school students, it presents the design of a distance programming course for high school students and it contributes to research and actions in distance education. LEARNING FROM STUDENTS' MISTAKES IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING COURSES Daniela C. C. Peixoto, Vitor A. Batista, Rodolfo F. Resende and Clarindo Isaías P. S. Pádua An important component of most Software Engineering courses is the software development team project. For most Software Engineering courses, the software development project provides to undergraduate students their best opportunity to learn about the "real-world" of software development, including team work, understanding client’s requirements, quality assurance, project management, and so on. The software development project in an undergraduate environment provides several benefits, but it also poses considerable challenge in fairly and accurately evaluating its results and applying the lessons learned in its improvement. In this article, we discuss issues and practices for improving the team project from the perspective of an introductory Software Engineering course at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We provide a contextualized evaluation, based on artifact defects produced by students. Ours results reinforces the belief that an understanding of cause-effect defects relationships offers a simple and low-cost method for improving the Software Engineering course and team project.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 125 Friday Sessions MODEL TO RECOVER THE COLOMBIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY BASED ON ICT STRATEGY Jimmy William Ramírez Cano This document is part of a research done from Master Science in Telecommunications Engineering program of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, that links three strategies for interconnection which aim is to rescue the culture in the country from the schools. The current document shows a development model to be incorporated in Colombian education and describes three fundamental axes for its implementation. Initially a description of the present educative organization in Colombia for the levels of elementary and high school education is done. Then, it focuses attention on the obligatory area of Technology and Computing extending the information with the advantages that this area has to the model by its varied alternatives of implementation and the promotion of competences for this decade. The proposal is articulated with the use of free software, the advantages that this has against the alternative of proprietary software and the existing relation with the increase in the use of pirate software in Latin America. The third axis considers the context of the competences that the teachers who implement the model must have, and finally, there is a description of the integration of the three elements mentioned and allows being viable within the educative policies in the following decade for Colombia. Session F2A: Mini Workshop - MUSE - Multi-University Systems Education Chair: Jeff Frolik, University of Vermont Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon A MINI WORKSHOP - MUSE - MULTI-UNIVERSITY SYSTEMS EDUCATION Paul Flikkema, Rhonda Franklin, Jeff Frolik, Carol Haden, Wayne Shiroma and Tom Weller This mini-workshop will thoroughly explore the MUSE instructional method that emphasizes systems thinking and that creates a learner-centric environment appropriate for today’s engineering students. By tapping unique expertise at multiple institutions in the timely area of wireless sensor networks, implementing an inverted classroom instructional method, and involving open-ended, hands-on experiences, the MUSE approach has been shown to provide a unique pedagogical experience. The mini-workshop will not only present the MUSE approach and results to date but also is designed to encourage participants to develop new MUSE collaborations based on other complex-engineered systems. Session F2B: Panel - Teaching Students to Participate in Open Source Software Projects Chair: Heidi J. C. Ellis, Western New England College Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon B PANEL - TEACHING STUDENTS TO PARTICIPATE IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, Mel Chua, Clif Kussmaul and Matthew M. Burke This panel will present several experiences in involving students in Open Source Software (OSS) projects from the perspectives of both the instructor and a member of the OSS community. OSS is growing rapidly and gaining market share in both industry (e.g., Linux and Mozilla) as well as academia (e.g, Moodle, Greenfoot, and Drupal). OSS projects have a culture built on volunteer participation to support software development. Computing degree programs desire to involve students in large-scale software projects to provide students with real-world experience and an understanding of the issues found in large, complex software projects. Involving computing students in OSS projects serves both the OSS community by providing development resources for the project while also serving the academic community by providing access to large software projects in which students can gain experience. However, the marriage of student and OSS project presents some challenges including identification of approachable OSS projects, creation of appropriate educational infrastructure, evaluation and grading, and more. Panelists will address the factors that contribute to student success in an OSS project. Session F2C: Entrepreneurship Education Chair: J. Douglass Klein, Union College Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - A SANDBOX MODEL FOR TEACHING ENTREPRENEURSHIP Xiang Fu, Simona Doboli and John Impagliazzo While major research universities enjoy a large pool of cutting-edge research projects for technology transfer, small liberal art institutions have to adopt a different model for promoting entrepreneurship due to resource limits. We propose a sandbox model for teaching entrepreneurship in a software engineering class. Student activities are closely monitored and coordinated by the instructor. Introduction of entrepreneurial thinking is tightly integrated with the milestone projects in the class. Students are allowed to fail, but they can always resume from the next milestone. We 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 126 Friday Sessions admit that the sandbox approach is highly debatable. Some faculty members believe that a fixed project topic may limit the creativity of students. On the other hand, we argue for the effectiveness of the approach. A good coverage of entrepreneurship topics can be achieved without requiring extra room in the curriculum. We report our preliminary experiences of implementing the sandbox model at Hofstra University. WORK IN PROGRESS - PREPARING ENGINEERS TO SOLVE GLOBAL PROBLEMS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP Angela Shartrand, Jennifer Keller Jackson and Phil Weilerstein This paper highlights innovative programs in which students and faculty members develop new tech-nologies that benefit poor people, and deploy them through economically sustainable business models. Since 2006, the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance has awarded forty-one grants totaling $1.8 million through the Sustainable Vision program. These initiatives, which are being developed and implemented by U.S. faculty and their students, have operated in twenty-six countries to date. All of the technologies are designed to improve quality of life and/or alleviate poverty, through increasing the accessibility or affordability of renewable energy, clean water, medical devices, improved agricultural tools, and shelter. Projects are working toward commercialization by developing sustainable business models to ensure that their technologies have maximum benefit for the intended users. Descriptions of two exemplary projects, including their accomplishments and challenges in the areas of technology, culture, and scalable model development are provided, illustrating faculty and student efforts to develop and implement engineering solutions that address basic human needs. WORK IN PROGRESS - TRANSFORMING ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION INSTRUCTION IN FLUID MECHANICS David Benson Case studies, a valuable tool in business education, are used to permit students access to situations and environments which are not accessible in a classroom. One element of a business case study differentiating it from a simple company history is that the tone and content is often designed with an ulterior objective or to achieve a certain state of mind before a discussion point: they are engineered learning environments. Within an engineering classroom, the business case study approach can be manipulated to introduce students to concepts of entrepreneurship and innovation and to facilitate an understanding of how classroom content can be employed in practice. A series of limited-scope case studies have been introduced in a junior-level Fluid Mechanics class which align entrepreneurship and innovation objectives with course content by introducing subject-specific analysis, sample application and reflection to the case studies. Two elements of a three-activity sequence are presented beginning with an introduction to entrepreneurship and the "painstorming" concept through a case study of a foam-reducing keg tap. The concept of social entrepreneurship is then introduced using a system implemented by a South African social entrepreneur to provide drinking water for rural communities using playground equipment as a pump. WORK IN PROGRESS - MEASURING AND ENHANCING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET OF FRESHMAN ENGINEERING STUDENTS Kenneth J. Reid and Daniel M. Ferguson Much has been made of the need for our future generations to be more entrepreneurial; that is, creative or innovative, with the ability to act on opportunities. Establishing an entrepreneurial mindset in college students is important to sustain the competitiveness of US economic organizations and the socioeconomic lifestyle of the US population through value and job creation. Despite entreaties to be more entrepreneurial, assessing and methods to nurture creativity and innovation, especially in our technically capable college graduates, remains an elusive goal. The objective of this research is to measure the entrepreneurial mindset of freshman engineering students and to evaluate whether interventions that are introduced through the first year change that mindset and assist engineering students in becoming more entrepreneurial. The first stage of this research is to measure the entrepreneurial mindset of first-year engineering students and how it changes over their freshman experiences, potentially enhanced by interventions specifically aimed at changing freshmen engineers’ attitudes, knowledge and skills relative to creativity and innovation. WORK IN PROGRESS - THE VIDEO SCENARIO APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING COMPUTATIONAL AND ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING SKILLS Madalene Spezialetti The use of video scenarios is an active learning approach designed to aid in the development of computational and entrepreneurial thinking skills. Video scenarios present problems in the context of life-like settings in order to emphasize the complexity as well as creative potential presented by problems which are diverse, multi-layered and frequently ill-defined. Students must carefully observe and critically listen to the characters in the videos in order to

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 127 Friday Sessions understand the problems they are experiencing. Through discussion, design or implementation, students explore potential ways in which computing can be used to help the characters solve their problems. The approach is designed to develop creative problem solving skills, while also encouraging students to view themselves as capable of entrepreneurship and innovation in computing. The videos are freely available on the website www.virt-u.org, and can be used for a wide range of learning activities. Session F2D: Entrepreneurship and Leadership Chair: Constantin Chassapis, Stevens Institute of Technology Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon D IMPROVING CAPSTONE DESIGN EDUCATION IN CIVIL ENGINEERING: THE POTENTIAL SYNERGIES BETWEEN ACADEMICS AND PRACTITIONERS Waddah Akili The trend toward increasing design component in civil engineering curricula is part of an effort to better prepare graduates for the practice. While some design projects are still of the “made up” type; majority of projects today deal with “real-world problems” and are usually conducted by student’s teams. The paper begins first by briefly reviewing the design as a “thought” process, focusing on “design thinking” and how “design thinking” skills are acquired. Second, the paper reports on the development, implementation, and subsequent evaluation of a senior design course at an international university, where practitioners from the Region have played a major role in teaching the capstone course. The restructured design course has met its objectives and exposed students to design practice. This industry-driven experience has also provided information on curricular content and capabilities of graduates. Outputs from the course can be used to provide guidance into: curricular changes, teaching methods, and civil engineering practice in the Region. Also, helps in establishing enduring connections with the industrial sector.

DEVELOPING CIVIL ENGINEERING LEADERS AT THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD ACADEMY Hudson Jackson, Kassim Tarhini, Anne Morrissey and Nathan Podoll Current ABET criteria expects the curricular content of engineering programs to include a general education component that is consistent with their objectives. This is usually accomplished by having students take non-technical courses in humanities and social science. The benefits of having engineering students take courses in humanities and social sciences cannot be overstated as these courses strongly promote personal, political (public policy) and professional leadership development. The United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) has been training engineers to serve as leaders in the Coast Guard and beyond for the past 100 years. The USCGA’s Civil Engineering curriculum fosters leadership development through a breadth of required core courses in the humanities, science, engineering, mathematics, professional maritime studies, organizational behavior, management, leadership and law. This combination of core courses and non-academic activities including military and physical education training has been proven successful in providing students with opportunities to develop leadership and management skills required for engineering practice. The authors discuss the leadership approach used at USCGA that could be adopted by other academic institution as they strive to develop civil engineering leaders.

WORK IN PROGRESS - PARTNERING WITH COAST GUARD ENGINEERS TO BRING THE FIELD INTO THE CLASSROOM USING MATERIAL SCIENCE CASE STUDIES David H. Plantz and William M. Simpson The introductory material science course at the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) is being transformed from a basic survey course to a more in depth course that includes the use of case studies relevant to the students’ future careers as Coast Guard engineers. The goals of the pedagogical approach are to spark greater interest by exposing students to contemporary materials issues and to demonstrate the relevance of material science to their future careers as Coast Guard engineers. There is a unique opportunity to engage officers who return from the field for various tours at the USCGA. As practitioners come into the classroom to discuss material science cases from the field, leadership and ethics issues are also explored. The authors present progress to date on incorporating case studies with active participation from Coast Guard engineers. Future plans to assess and refine this pedagogical technique are also discussed. LEARNING SCIENCE PRINCIPLES FOR EFFECTIVE ONLINE LEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE Daryl Lawton, John Bransford, Nancy Vye, Michael C. Richey, Vivian T. Dang and David E. French We present an experiment involving the analysis and redesign of an online course that has been in existence for several years at Boeing. We created an experimental version of the course to explore the differential impact of a mix of learning science frameworks: integrating different types of formative and reflective feedback; minimizing cognitive load by restructuring lecture-derived text-centric materials into short, narrated, student-controlled videos;

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 128 Friday Sessions and using a learning management system (LMS) that supported social interactions and learner collaboration. We found significant differences between the existing course and the new course. Subjects in the experimental course learned more and at a greater rate. They had a more engaged attitude toward their future learning and less dependence on their level of initial subject knowledge. The social collaboration and data collection capabilities of the LMS supported continuous online course improvement during course development, but these tools had limited spontaneous use by students during the experiment. We describe the impact of these findings on developing an evidence-based methodology for implementing online learning experiences and future work. WORK IN PROGRESS - ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP PROGRAM: A THEMATIC LEARNING COMMUNITY Krishna S Athreya, Nidhi Bhandari, Michael T. Kalkhoff, Diane T Rover, Alexandra M. Black, Elif Miskioglu and Steven K Mickelson The Engineering Leadership Program, which began at Iowa State University in 2006 as a four year pilot leadership development program for undergraduate engineering students, is now working on mainstreaming the program. It has evolved into a student-led co-curricular leadership learning community with a strong focus on service and community, and is serving as a model for other holistic-themed learning communities in the college. A new scholars program in the college based on the Engineer of 2020 has four learning pillars, including leadership, and was created using the Engineering Leadership Program as a model. Planning is underway on strategies to mainstream best practices from the pilot and the optimal channels to deliver them. The learning outcomes assessment of the program is a work in progress. The first cohort entered in 2006 and graduates in 2010, and their early career accomplishments will be one indicator of longer term program impact. Session F2E: K- 12: Design Activities for Secondary Students Chair: Larry G Richards, University of Virginia Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon K OUTREACH PROJECT INTRODUCING COMPUTER ENGINEERING TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS Michael Gasser, Yung-Hsiang Lu and Cheng-Kok Koh This paper presents an outreach program that targets students in high school. The program is designed to be fun, hands-on, and interactive, while introducing educational building blocks that will prepare students for careers in computer engineering. Key concepts introduced to students include logic design, hardware-software interface, simple circuit design, robust design practices, and teamwork. An adaptation of the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is the platform on which this program is built. Teams of students construct dance pads from arts and crafts materials and aluminum foil. They also design and implement a scoring circuit based on Boolean logic, using logic gates on a solder-less breadboard. The scoring circuit is then interfaced with a preprogrammed micro controller and graphical user interface to complete the DDR design. Using DDR as a platform allows students to conquer several design challenges including building reliable dance pads and designing logic for a scoring circuit. The program was used three times during engineering summer camps hosted by the Minority Engineering Program and Women In Engineering Program at Purdue University in 2009. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from the students that participated. EFFECTIVE IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL OUTREACH PROGRAMS Chad Mano, Vicki Allan and Donald Cooley In the summer of 2007, we established the Utah State University Computer Science Outreach Laboratory as a partnership with a local K-8 school. One major advantage of this outreach program is that we are able to interact with all students in the target grades, not only those who are already interested in computers, as would happen with a computer club or other extracurricular program. This paper presents a sampling of the periodic in-class activities led by University faculty members and volunteer students. Through these activities participants have the opportunity to learn about a variety of computing topics. The core goal of this program is to increase the interest levels in computing among these young students. While the long-term effects are not immediately apparent, surveys of participating students indicate that activities are making a valuable impact. This is supported through our personal observations of, and interactions with, the student participants.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 129 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS: LESSONS LEARNED DURING TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PILOT PROGRAM - IMPACT ON CURRICULUM TEACHER'S GUIDE DEVELOPMENT AND FUTURE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE Julia Ross and Taryn Bayles A Professional Development (PD) pilot program was conducted with twelve High School Technology Education teachers during the summer of 2009. The three week PD Institute threaded the use of the INSPIRES (INcreasing Student Participation, Interest and Recruitment in Engineering & Science) curriculum throughout the program which included deepened teacher content knowledge, pedagogical practices, practice instruction with Upward Bound students, and reflection & evaluation of the videotaped instruction. Each of the teachers have re-enacted the curriculum with their classes in the following academic year. We are now developing a new INSPIRES curriculum module and based on our experiences with the PD pilot program, we are now planning improvements to the next PD Institute. Student learning assessments and changes in teacher practice will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the PD Institute. WORK IN PROGRESS - 2D PAPER TRUSSES AS A MECHANISM FOR TEACHING K12 FUNDAMENTAL STEM TOPICS David Hall, Michael Swanbom and Heath Tims Louisiana Tech University in partnership with three local high schools has recently developed NASA-Threads, a high school curriculum that integrates engineering, mathematics, and physics. The curriculum uses hands-on projects that develop student ability to solve realistic multiple-step problems and bring excitement into the classroom. One of the projects implemented in the “Work and Mechanics” portion of the curriculum involves the design, fabrication and testing of a two dimensional (2D) paper truss. Tensile truss members are made of dogbone-shaped manila folder strips, compressive specimens are made from paper mat board, and joints are held together with aluminum screw posts. The truss geometry and testing configuration ensure that the truss will fail when the most heavily loaded tensile member reaches its breaking strength. Tensile testing of individual members prior to the design process provides the data needed for students to design a truss whose load carrying capacity can be accurately estimated. The 2D paper trusses are easy to fabricate when compared to other paper or wooden trusses and provide an excellent way to introduce high school students to structural mechanics.

WORK IN PROGRESS - INTRODUCING ENGINEERING TO MIDDLE-SCHOOL STUDENTS DURING A GREEN SUMMER INSTITUTE Koenraad Gieskes, Daniel Brennan, Andy Cavagnetto, Susannah Gal, Wayne Jones, Roy McGrann and Thomas O'Brien This work-in-progress paper describes the math and engineering module of the Go Green Institute at Binghamton University. This institute is a 10-day summer program for middle school students and was developed in an effort to increase the level of understanding of the scientific aspects of environmental sustainability and to promote interest in science, technology, engineering, and math careers. The Go Green Institute is comprised of three course modules; (1) Biology/Life Science, (2) Chemistry/Physical Science, and (3) Math/Engineering, all with a focus on climate change and sustainability issues. Along with these course modules the institute also included field trips, guest speakers, and team projects that were all related to the institute’s goals. The focus of this paper is on the math and engineering module of the institute. The curriculum of this module will be presented and its effectiveness will be discussed. In addition, a plan for an assessment of the effect of the curriculum on the student's interest in the field of engineering will be presented. Session F2F: Innovative Labs Chair: Geoffrey Herman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon E & F YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS: THE ART & SCIENCE OF FLOW VISUALIZATION Jenn Stroud Rossmann and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky The flow of fluids explains how airplanes fly, why a curveball curves, why atherosclerotic plaque clogs arteries, why Jupiter’s red spot is changing size, and how hurricanes form. Yet it is difficult to see fluids flowing: you can’t see the wind, or ocean currents, without the techniques of flow visualization. Flow visualization reveals an invisible world of fluid dynamics, blending scientific investigation and artistic exploration. The resulting images have inspired, and in some cases themselves become appreciated as, art. At Lafayette College, a sophomore-level seminar in The Art and Science of Flow Visualization exposes students to these techniques and the science of fluid mechanics, and to the photographic methods needed to create effective images that are successful both scientifically and artistically. Unlike 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 130 Friday Sessions other courses in flow visualization, this course assumes no a priori familiarity with fluid flow or with photography. The fundamentals of both are taught and practiced in a studio setting. Students are engaged in an interdisciplinary discourse about fluids and physics, photography, scientific ethics, and historical societal responses to science and art. The development, implementation, and assessment of this team-taught course will be discussed. WORK IN PROGRESS - IMPROVING WEB SECURITY EDUCATION WITH VIRTUAL LABS AND SHARED COURSE MODULES Lixin Tao, Li-Chiou Chen and Chienting Lin One challenge in web security education is its interdisciplinary and practical nature. Students need to have the basic knowledge and skills of a web developer to understand many of the web security topics, and some of them are normally covered in multiple advanced courses like Computer Networks and Network Security, or are absent from many existing undergraduate or graduate degree programs. This paper shares our experience of using VMware virtual machines in supporting hands-on web security education, and developing multiple virtual web security lab modules based on the virtual machines. The lab modules are part of our NSF SWEET (Secure WEb dEvelopment Teaching) project, and each of them contains (1) concepts in a nutshell; (2) lab objectives; (3) software setup; (4) detailed lab instructions; and (5) lab evaluations. Comprehensive lab modules have been developed to guide students to build virtual Ubuntu virtual machines with publicly available tools and install all necessary web servers, application servers and database servers on them so they can function as the foundation and platforms of the other course modules. The other covered course modules include cryptography, HTTP and HTTPS protocols, and introduction to Java web technologies. BUILDING LEARNING BRIDGES AMONG UNDERGRADUATE COURSES OF ELECTRONICS, POWER ELECTRONICS AND ELECTRIC DRIVES LAB Lin Zhao and Fong Mak This paper presents the authors’ innovative teaching practice of linking three core courses (Electronics in Junior first semester, Power Electronics in Junior second semester and Electric Drives Lab in Senior first semester) in Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum with special designed projects and labs. Traditionally these three courses are taught in relative isolation with each course focusing on its own teaching materials and structure. Even though students get satisfied grade and successfully complete all the experiments for each course, they still struggle when coming to combine all the knowledge they learned to design and integrate a complex system. The idea is to deliver these three courses as a group and introduce the concept of the higher level course in the lower level course by special designed course projects to reveal the linkage between the two courses by employing zoom-in/out approach.

WORK IN PROGRESS - BRING GREEN COMPUTING TO CS CORE CURRICULUM WITH A PORTABLE LAB Kai Qian, Chia-Tien Dan Lo and Li Yang Underdevelopment is novel reusable labware for computer science (CS) core curriculum. This labware contains a relatively inexpensive portable Wireless Sensor Network kit in a Box (WinBox), along with a variety of predesigned labs ranging from fundamental to advanced concepts in CS core curriculum. Exemplary projects are depicted to show how this WinBox can be reused in several CS core courses. With its portability, the WinBox makes feasible to offer on-line lab intensive courses. Much of our effort is made on inculcating CS students in greening computing due to its increasing importance. By bringing green computing experience to students and instructors through the hands-on projects, we aim to promote students’ innovation in pervasive green computing. This pedagogical model harnesses a wide range of wireless hardware/software co-design skills in CS education to address a need in embedded system workforces. This affordable WinBox renders an educational resource for budget limited institutions. FOSTERING STUDENT INVOLVEMENT AND COLLABORATION IN A NON-MAJORS' PROGRAMMING COURSE Carolyn Pe Rosiene and Joel A. Rosiene The ubiquitous lecture, using a slide show or the traditional blackboard, is, arguably, best used at the end of an introduction to a programming topic, not at the onset. This paper documents a technique which demonstrates that illustrating the programming construct and syntax is best delivered through an example, by showing students actual code samples, actual runs, demonstrations, and tests, before the syntax of the construct is introduced. Moreover, one student from the class is selected to act as the “typist” (rather than the instructor) to enter code into the IDE which is visible to the rest of the class. By introducing the student to a well-structured illustration and having students get first-hand experience on the subject matter, students are more involved in the classroom, participate and play a role towards attaining the lesson's goals. This is supported with empirical data that shows students’ inclination toward the idea of partaking in an active, collaborative classroom.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 131 Friday Sessions Session F2G: Assessment Research Chair: Jan Vahrenhold, Technische Universität Dortmund Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPMENT OF A DESIGN TASK TO ASSESS STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN Roy B. Melton, Carla B. Zoltowski, Monica E. Cardella and William C. Oakes Developing a human-centered approach to design is vital to appropriately preparing graduates for the globally competitive workplace. An important facet of education is assessment. We are developing a design task to assess students’ skills in doing, feelings toward, and knowledge about human-centered design. This assessment tool could be used not only by educators, but also by researchers to characterize changes in students’ understanding of human-centered design. The assessment task is informed by findings from a phenomenographic study that identified and described dimensions of variation in students’ understanding of human-centered design as well as a literature review and comparison of how design has been studied. A goal of this assessment tool is to make a student’s understanding of human-centered design easily observable through oral communication or artifact development, and provide insights into how students value the user as an inclusive partner throughout the design process. HOW TO APPROACH AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ENGINEERING PROBLEM: CHARACTERIZING UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS Alexandra E. Coso, R. Reid Bailey and Ellen Minzenmayer Interdisciplinary undergraduate engineering programs have increased in importance and significance over the past decade. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of these interdisciplinary courses and programs, it is important to examine how students’ perceptions develop through the duration of the course or program, specifically in regards to their approach to an interdisciplinary engineering problem. The overall purpose of this research is to assess second-year undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions of interdisciplinary engineering work. In this study, students applied their knowledge to a real-world design problem. Students’ responses were analyzed using verbal protocol analysis and a pre-defined coding scheme, which focused on four dimensions of interdisciplinary understanding. While the quantitative analysis does not reveal many statistically significant associations, these results reinforced those published in previous studies. Qualitative analysis of the data identified trends due to gender effects and interactions. In addition, the findings indicated students’ awareness of the interdisciplinary approach and the importance of team dynamics within interdisciplinary projects. WORK IN PROGRESS - A CONCEPTIONS OF DESIGN INSTRUMENT AS AN ASSESSMENT TOOL Robin S. Adams and Bethany Fralick This study was conducted in spring of 2009 in a first year engineering course for honors students. 234 students completed a pre-test on what activities they considered most or least important in design; 191 students completed an identical post-test and of these 115 pairs of students completed both tests. Statistical analyses explored differences across five sections of the course and at the paired level. Overall, study findings identify improvements to the instrument and support the utility of the instrument as an assessment tool.

WORK IN PROGRESS - RETENTION AND APPLICATION OF WRITING SKILLS LEARNED IN SOPHOMORE CLINIC I Roberta Harvey and Jennifer Kadlowec Assessment of writing and design are active areas of research in engineering education, as are issues of retention and transfer of learning. A variety of methodologies have been applied to these questions, including surveys directed to measuring design skills and rubrics describing desired textual features. Retention and transfer of learning research generally focuses on evaluating strategies for reinforcing or augmenting writing instruction in advanced engineering courses, which usually involve explicit emphasis on organization, grammar, style, and clarity. More progressive approaches recognize the rhetorical complexity of engineering writing and encompass matters of content as well. Writing in design courses has been of particular interest in this regard. The present study focuses on a junior/senior level design course. Rubrics to evaluate experimental research reports and final design reports from this course were developed. The rubrics are based on assignments and rubrics from earlier courses where students initially receive instruction and practice in experimental and design projects and the associated reports. The rubric indicators address typical elements of reports, such as adherence to format and style conventions, but also capture rhetorical strategies associated with design thinking. The presentation of this work will describe the writing assessment methodology and preliminary results.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 132 Friday Sessions THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESTIMATED COGNITIVE ATTRIBUTE PROFILES FOR THE CONCEPT ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR STATIC Aidsa I. Santiago Roman, Ruth A. Streveler and Louis DiBello The Concept Assessment Tool for Statics is a concept inventory instrument designed to detect errors associated with important and difficult statics concepts. This paper discuses findings from a previous study in which the Arpeggio Software, used to determine the cognitive capability of an assessment instrument, was applied to the concept inventory. Based on a set of cognitive attributes and responses from over 1200 participants, the Arpeggio Software generated estimates of the proportion of members of the population whose estimated attributes’ masteries were incorrect. Two research questions guided this study: (1) Can the Fusion Model be appropriately used with CATS to diagnostically measure students’ cognitive understanding of Statics concepts? If so, (2) What are the expected patterns of cognitive attribute mastery for the examinees? Results from the analysis showed the diagnostic capacity of the CATS and also the cognitive attributes with the highest occurrence of non-mastery for the sample provided. This information is very helpful to instructors, because it allows them to predict their student’s cognitive capacity for the course according to the estimated mastery profiles generated by Arpeggio. Session F2H: First-Year Courses for Retention Chair: Lisa C. Benson, Clemson University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon H WORK IN PROGRESS - WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? OVER CONFIDENCE IN FIRST YEAR STUDENTS Brett Hamlin, Jonathan Riehl, AJ Hamlin and Amy Monte Michigan Technological University is one of the nation’s largest engineering schools (900+ first year students) and houses a large common first year engineering curriculum. The purpose of this curriculum is to introduce many of the fundamental components of engineering. One of these components is the use of modern computational and programming tools to solve engineering problems. This paper continues a long-term study that began in 2007 and focuses on student confidence with the use of computational tools. On the first day of class, students were surveyed on their proficiency with the use of spreadsheets. Students self reported levels of proficiency from expert to no experience. Students were then asked a simple question regarding a spreadsheet cell equation. Over three years only 16% of the students were correct, while 90% self ranked as familiar or better. A gender bias was noted as women under estimated their skills while men overestimated their own abilities. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge of gender confidence gaps. Additionally, it lays the groundwork for creating an assessment plan to identify the preparedness of incoming students and measure their skill at the end of the course.

CAN I REALLY COMPLETE THIS CSE DOCTORAL DEGREE? WOMEN’S CONFIDENCE AND SELF-RATED ABILITIES Jie Chao and J. McGrath Cohoon Confidence affects persistence in computer science and computer engineering (CSE) doctoral programs. With data from 328 doctoral women in CSE, this study examined the relationships between confidence and academic self-ratings for women in different stages of doctoral study, with and without accounting for contextual factors that predict confidence. Also examined are factors that may predict self-ratings. Our findings reveal that these women are generally confident that they will earn their doctoral degree. Their academic self-ratings positively predict confidence even when contextual factors are taken into account, although the predictions vary across stages in doctoral education. Certain individual characteristics are associated with self-ratings. Explanations and implications of these findings are discussed. STUDENT PREFERENCES BETWEEN OPEN-ENDED AND STRUCTURED GAME ASSIGNMENTS IN CS1 Daniel C Cliburn, Susan M Miller and Emma Bowring Introductory computer programming courses (CS1) traditionally are plagued with high failure and drop-out rates. In an attempt to change these negative outcomes, games have often been introduced into computing curricula as learning activities and programming projects. This paper builds on prior work to determine (a) the type of game assignment that students prefer (i.e., structured game assignments [those for which the entire assignment is completely described] or open-ended game assignments [those for which only basic requirements are specified allowing students to make up their own game]); and, (b) students’ reasons for their preference. Forty-six students in two sections of an introductory programming course completed over 200 assignments during the fall 2009 semester. For each assignment, students were given a choice between structured and open-ended game assignments. Somewhat surprisingly, over 90% of submitted assignments were the structured game option even though the open-ended option could have required less code in most cases.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 133 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - ENHANCED DELIVERY FOR INTRODUCTORY COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES Asad Azemi and Nannette D’Imperio In this work, we report our initial results based on an innovative approach that we started last year for delivering an introductory computer science course. The teaching approach consisted of a team teaching, a blended delivery system, recorded lecture retrieval capability, readiness assessment activities, objective assessment of student progress, and cooperative learning through team work. During our last delivery, we added post-assessments and results related to this addition are presented in the paper. Our intent is to present a preliminary evaluation of the aforementioned approach as well as future direction and adjustments. WORK IN PROGRESS - ELICITING INTEGRATED UNDERSTANDINGS OF HIGH SCHOOL STEM CURRICULA THROUGH PROGRAMMING Eric Freudenthal, Alexandira N. Ogrey and Rebeca Q. Gonzalez We describe our early investigation of the integration of educational modules originally developed for a college-level entering students program (ESP) titled "Media Propelled Computational Thinking" (MPCT) into high school science, math, and engineering/technology courses. Primary objectives of MPCT include introducing students to imperative programming and reinforcement of foundational mathematical concepts. This report describes this evolving integration including early informal experiments and potential extensions using programming functions of ubiquitous graphing calculators. Session F2J: Panel - Solving Engineering Problems in Context: Preliminary Results from Case Studies of Six Exemplary Engineering Programs Chair: Patrick T. Terenzini, The Pennsylvania State University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon J PANEL - SOLVING ENGINEERING PROBLEMS IN CONTEXT: PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM CASE STUDIES OF SIX EXEMPLARY ENGINEERING PROGRAMS Lisa R. Lattuca, Carolyn Plumb, Patrick T. Terenzini and Lois C. Trautvetter This panel discussion will provide preliminary findings from a National Science Foundation funded project, Prototyping the Engineer of 2020: A 360-degree Study of Effective Education (P360). is the study explores how the educational practices of six diverse institutions (Arizona State University, Harvey Mudd College, Howard University, MIT, University of Michigan, and Virginia Tech) promote the development of engineering students' contextual competence. Contextual competence is defined as an engineer's ability to anticipate and understand the constraints and impacts of social, cultural, environmental, political, and other contexts on engineering solutions and vice versa. In this session, we share case study findings that reveal a variety of curricular and co-curricular experiences intended to cultivate contextual competence. These include general engineering programs, first-year programs, design-focused curricula, client-based capstone courses, hands-on laboratory courses, project and problem-based learning activities, design competitions, undergraduate research programs, and student clubs. In addition to describing these curricular, instructional, and co-curricular experiences, the session will demonstrate how the institutional cultures, practices, and policies support the development of contextual competence in undergraduate engineers. Session F3A: Special Session - What Should a Course Reader on Gender and Engineering Include? An Unconference Discussion Chair: Alice L. Pawley, Purdue University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon A SPECIAL SESSION - WHAT SHOULD A COURSE READER ON GENDER AND ENGINEERING INCLUDE? AN UNCONFERENCE DISCUSSION Alice L. Pawley and Donna Riley To build upon the community that has formed at FIE interested in discussing feminist approaches to engineering education, we will hold a special session dis-cussion oriented around proposing a textbook that com-prehensively explores the topic of gender and engineer-ing. Through the organization of an “unconference” session discussion will include opportunity to discuss the audience and scope of such a proposed book, as well as explore the advantages and challenges of some of the existing texts on the market. The authors of this special session commit to turning the results of this discussion into a book prospectus to be distributed to appropriate publishers who might be interested in supporting such a book.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 134 Friday Sessions Session F3B: Panel - Computer Scientists Wanted! Strategies for Increasing Interest in Computer Science Chair: Karen Anewalt, University of Mary Washington Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon B PANEL - COMPUTER SCIENTISTS WANTED! STRATEGIES FOR INCREASING INTEREST IN COMPUTER SCIENCE Karen Anewalt, Jessen Havill, Chang Liu and Jennifer Polack-Wahl Diverse strategies have been used to improve student awareness and interest in computer science. Research suggests that by focusing on rich interdisciplinary subfields of the computing discipline, computer science courses will be more appealing to women and other underrepresented groups. Inspired by these findings, the panelists use application areas and games in a variety of venues to engage students in the study of computer science. Experiences with a middle school outreach program in Appalachia will be described. Additionally new courses including an introduction to scientific modeling, seminars on social networking and gaming, and a course in digital storytelling will be discussed. Open discussion with the audience will follow the panelists’ remarks. Session F3C: Engineering Laboratory Experiences Chair: Michael E. Auer, Carinthia Tech Institute Villach Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - WHO’S DRIVING? STRUCTURED PAIRS IN AN INTRODUCTORY ELECTRONICS LABORATORY Nicholas D. Fila and Michael C. Loui Pair programming, a method of structuring student groups in computer science courses, has been found to increase student confidence, satisfaction, and retention in the computer science major. We developed a similar method of structuring student groups in an engineering laboratory, called “structured pairing.” We implemented structured pairing in an introductory electronics laboratory. We compared structured pairing with traditional student groups, using an end-of-semester survey, focus group interviews, student laboratory reports, and final examination scores. We will also compare retention data.

WORK IN PROGRESS - A UBIQUITOUS LABORATORY MODEL TO ENHANCE LEARNING IN ELECTRONICS COURSES OFFERED BY TWO UNIVERSITIES WITH DISSIMILAR CURRICULA Jianchu Yao, Loren Limberis and Steve Warren Mobile data acquisition technology in the hands of computer-proficient college students provides opportunities to transform electronics laboratory education into a more ubiquitous model. The use of virtual instruments (VIs), handheld data acquisition (DAQ) modules, and supporting portable hardware can (a) encourage students to work outside of the classroom on procedural hands-on learning activities and (b) promote students’ higher-level thinking via instructor and student interactions during follow-on meeting times. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program, explores ways to implement this more ubiquitous education model. The project team will (1) develop inexpensive mobile laboratory tools, (2) create new laboratory protocols, (3) assess the impact of these learning experiences, and (4) disseminate these tools and assessment results. This paper focuses on tasks (2) and (3) for four courses in the East Carolina University (ECU) General Engineering program and the Kansas State University (KSU) Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) programs. USING A REMOTE EMULATED LABORATORY IN A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS COURSE Maria-Dolores Cano The new European Higher Education System, which is being already implemented in European universities, is very demanding in terms of methodologies that increase students’ involvement in the courses. Although new laboratory activities (remote, virtual, etc.) offer several advantages, traditional hands-on labs are still the most common methodology. This paper describes the experience of using a remote emulated laboratory for the Distributed Information Systems course in the Telematics Engineering degree. The educational value, benefits, and weaknesses of the remote emulated laboratory experience are assessed by the students’ feedback through anonymous questionnaires, and by the students’ final grades. Results show that doing lab activities through a remote emulated platform is not a complex activity from the students’ perspective. Moreover, students’ motivation was increased by varying the laboratory routine, and students’ acquisition of knowledge was more consistent. The surveys demonstrated that students’ attitude towards new lab approaches is very positive, and success in the final written exam improved almost 30%. Nevertheless, remote emulated labs do not completely cover all benefits of the hands-on 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 135 Friday Sessions labs, so both types should be integrated so that students benefit from the inherent characteristics of both of them. GUIDED INQUIRY LABORATORY EXERCISES DESIGNED TO DEVELOP QUALITATIVE REASONING SKILLS IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS Gerald Recktenwald and Robert Edwards We describe inquiry-based lab exercises designed to develop qualitative reasoning skills. The exercises require students to predict outcomes before making measurements, and to compare predictions to measurements as soon as those measurements are available. The predict-then-confirm process aims to develop both qualitative and quantitative reasoning as a practical engineering skill and as a method of gaining deeper understanding of the material. Qualitative reasoning involves the use of engineering models and formulas to draw conclusions without resorting to numerical computation. In this paper, examples of qualitative reasoning are demonstrated for measurements on a kitchen blender and a toaster. Because this equipment familiar to students and has readily understood operating principles, qualitative reasoning can be introduced as a way to extend common sense ideas about how and why the equipment works. WORK IN PROGRESS - A PROGRAM TO INCORPORATE PORTABLE LABS INTO LECTURE-BASED ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING COURSES Bonnie Ferri and Jill Auerbach This Work in Progress paper describes the Teaching Enhancement via Small-Scale Affordable Labs (TESSAL) Center at Georgia Tech. This center is devoted to the development and implementation of distributed labs, that is, experiments that can be done by students at home or in the classroom. The objective is to introduce experiment-based active learning into typical lecture-based courses. A total of 1264 students at Georgia Tech have participated in TESSAL activities, and assessment is underway to determine its effectiveness in enhancing the learning of fundamental concepts and in inspiring the students in the topics being taught. This paper describes the best practices for implementing distributed labs as well as the infrastructure needed to support the labs: logistical plans, instructor resources, student resources, and web-based support. Session F3D: Courseware Technologies I Chair: Jim Rowland, University of Kansas Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon D ORCHESTRATING GROUPWARE IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Roberto Perez-Rodriguez, Manuel Caeiro-Rodriguez, Jorge Fontenla-Gonzalez and Luis Anido-Rifon Engineering Education usually involves a big amount of practical work, such as simulations, programming, circuits design, etc, that may be carried out individually or in groups. Usually, laboratories count with materials and equipment, including theoretical books in a shelf, and an experiment is proposed to students organized in pairs/groups, who must compose a report of the experiment/practice. In regard to ICT support of Engineering Education scenarios a plethora of online simulators, e-books, wikis and other social software are usually scattered in multiple web sites. To solve this issue, we present an architectural approach based in two main points: a central EML engine, and a middleware for the integration of third-party tools.

WORK IN PROGRESS – APPLYING ELEMENTS OF SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES TO GAME-BASED LEARNING SCENARIOS INTENDED TO FOSTER THE LITERACY SKILLS OF IMMIGRANT STUDENTS Silke Günther In this paper, we discuss game-based learning scenarios intended to foster the reading skills of immigrant students while teaching subject matter. The example illustrates a game that incorporates problem-based learning of mathematical concepts into a text-based adventure game. With regard to the heterogeneous group of immigrant students, there is a reading gap, which has a negative impact on their overall educational achievement. After a brief discussion of game-based learning as a means of supporting the acquisition of reading skills, we present an example that incorporates the problem-based learning of mathematical concepts into a text-based adventure game. The games are being implemented in Python, using PyGame. In its final state, our work will incorporate elements of service-oriented architectures to cope with the high demands on flexibility set by the heterogeneous target group of immigrant students.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 136 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - COMPUTER SIMULATIONS TO CORRECT MISCONCEPTIONS IN FLUID FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER FUNDAMENTALS William M. Clark The use of computer simulation of basic fluid flow and heat transfer processes to correct misconceptions and improve learning of engineering principles is being investigated. Computer simulations that emphasize visualization of velocity, pressure, and temperature profiles in simple fluid flow and heat transfer problems were made with COMSOL Multiphysics(TM), a user friendly commercial finite element software package. The simulations were used in a senior chemical engineering laboratory course as part of a review of fundamentals before proceeding to more involved studies of fluid flow and heat transfer in real world equipment. To assess the value of the simulations, students were given diagnostic quizzes with relevant concept inventory questions before and after they used them. The students had previously studied fluids and heat transfer, but the diagnostic quizzes indicated they had forgotten or misunderstood some of the fundamentals. These students scored significantly higher on the diagnostic quizzes after they studied the simulations than they did before. WORK IN PROGRESS - SOFTWARE SUPPORT FOR WRITING WIKI TEXTBOOKS Edward F. Gehringer, Reejesh Kadanjoth and Jennifer Kidd Emerging information technologies are enabling new forms of content delivery. Recent research shows that students are capable of writing a peer-reviewed textbook for their own course. The pedagog¬ical advantages are num¬erous. Peer review is essential for managing the process in a timely matter. There are many administrative tasks, e.g., assigning topics, assigning reviewers, getting feedback to authors, calculating grades. Performing them without a special¬ized software system is a big burden on the course staff. The Expertiza project is building a software system to manage creation and peer review of a wiki textbook, automating features such as double-blind feedback between author and reviewer, and support for flow management to allow different chapters of the text to be written and reviewed at different times during the course. It promises to bring wiki textbook-writing to a much wider audience.

ONLINE FTR LOG TOOL IN A CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT Wook-Sung Yoo and Susannah M. Cary Online FTR Log Tool in a classroom environment is a web-based application to teach and learn the Formal Technical Review process in the software engineering classroom environment. Although the Formal Technical Review (FTR) has been known as one of the best-practice techniques to ensure quality of software products, this effective technique has not been widely used in modern software development in industry due to the lack of training and excessive clerical overhead. The FTR data-collection and reporting processes have usually been implemented in paper form or spreadsheets. Although some computer-based tools are currently available, they do not include the whole FTR process or are not very useful in classroom environments. To address these issues, a web-based Online FTR Log Tool was implemented to manage the entire FTR process in the classroom environment. Variations of this web-based tool have been used in both industrial and academic environments. Session F3E: Recruitment and Retention I Chair: Mary R. Anderson-Rowland, Arizona State University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon K WHO LEAVES AND WHEN DO THEY GO? RETENTION AND ATTRITION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Elizabeth Godfrey, Tim Aubrey, Caroline Crosthwaite and Robin King At a time of high demand for engineering graduates, the mean graduation completion rate of engineering undergraduates in Australia has been identified as approximately 54% (with considerable variation across institutions and sectors). This paper reports on the initial results of cohort analyses undertaken at two engineering degree granting institutions as part of a multi institutional project seeking to understand and reduce student attrition from engineering degrees across Australia. Both institutions have a predominantly urban student population and location, but whilst one offers a conventional four year degree the other integrates two semesters of internship into its degree structure. A cohort analysis procedure, tracking pathways to completion or non-completion of the degree, applicable across diverse institutions, was piloted. Attributes such as gender, academic background, full or part time study, engineering major and student maturity were identified for each member of the cohort. The patterns revealed by these fine grained cohort analyses challenged some anecdotal perceptions and provided evidence of the inadequate nature of generalizations around attrition statistics, and the need for institutional context and culture to be considered.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 137 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS – MILITARY TROOPS TO ENGINEERS David T. Hayhurst, Dave M. Johnson and Alyson L. Lighthart As part of a seven-university, NSF-sponsored initiative aimed at engaging U.S. military veterans in engineering, San Diego State University is conducting a comprehensive review of the U.S. military technical training in engineering and related fields. The specific objective is to determine ways to shorten the time to degree for military veterans entering engineering majors. To that end, a systematic examination of the student learning outcomes in military training courses as compared to courses in the engineering undergraduate degree plan is currently underway. This comparative review has required in-depth analysis of both the military education and the potential obstacles that veterans bring to an engineering degree program. Because they require a known series of courses in a specific field, the framework of military professions—as Military Occupational Specialties (Marines, Army), Naval Rates, and Air Force Specialty Codes—provides the best guidance in determining potential articulation pathways. WHAT MAKES STUDENTS ENROLL IN ENGINEERING: A CASE STUDY Hoda Baytiyeh and Mohamad K. Naja Recently, Engineering programs in the Middle East have witnessed a remarkable increase in students’ enrollment. To investigate the motives behind such increase, three universities in Lebanon were targeted as a case study. A Likert-scaled survey measuring different types of influences and motives was completed by (n=387) undergraduate engineering students. The results showed that the genuine interest in the field was the main influence affecting the students’ own decision. Also, the study examined various intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors through four categories: personal growth, professional growth, social growth, and financial growth. The descriptive statistics of the measured items showed the professional growth including job satisfaction that improves the level of students’ creativity in a challenging environment was the leading motivator for choosing engineering. The analysis discusses the identical importance for intrinsic and extrinsic factors which suggest the students’ need for a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic driven prospects for a life time profession.

WORK IN PROGRESS - ACADEMIC PATHWAYS OF PEOPLE LEARNING ENGINEERING - AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY Elizabeth Godfrey, Tim Aubrey and Robin King In Australia a multi-institutional project is underway, with one of its major themes the understanding and reduction of attrition in engineering programs. The Academic Pathways for People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES) instrument was trialled at a participating institution as a possible precursor to its application in the eight collaborating institutions. APPLES had been validated and delivered to over 4000 engineering undergraduates by the Academic Pathways Study in the US. The survey was trialled with 259 engineering students from different year levels to explore its potential to find links between students’ perceptions of their motivation, skills and confidence with their goals to continue to degree completion and employment in engineering. This paper reports on the initial findings from the Australian pilot study. Matching the self reported data in the survey with statistical data has, even at this initial stage, highlighted some discrepancies and topics for further investigation.

WORK IN PROGRESS – RECRUITING INITIATIVES FOR HISPANIC, FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS Denise Martinez, Jason Jacks, Dennis Jones, Brenda Faulkner and Peter Bell The “Program to Increase College Opportunities and Successes” (PICOS) is an NSF S-STEM funded initiative to increase the number of Hispanic, first-generation, economically disadvantaged students in Math, Chemistry, Engineering, and Engineering Technology using scholarship funds and academic success initiatives. The first phase of the project was implementing a recruiting strategy. To facilitate this, a recruiting advisory board composed of Hispanic representatives from the community and university was established. This board helped develop recruiting materials, educate the management team on Hispanic family dynamics, and advertise the program in the community. A second component was to have a knowledgeable recruiter involved in the program. The recruiter also served as liaison between the PICOS program and the broader university recruiters. A third component was to alleviate anxieties about college preparedness and transition by incorporating a summer bridge program. In the first two years, 25 students were recruited into the target majors, nearly doubling the overall Hispanic enrollment in these majors. This paper will elaborate on the recruiting strategies and impacts associated with this phase of the PICOS program.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 138 Friday Sessions Session F3F: Innovative Learning: Integrating Affordances of a Digital Age into Engineering and Technology Curriculums Chair: Lynroy Grant, University of Hartford Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon E & F WORK IN PROGRESS - INTEGRATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOW PARADIGM INTO HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND LARGE SCALE DATA MANAGEMENT CURRICULA Brandeis Marshall, John Springer and Thomas Hacker With the onset of the digital age, more scientists are using computer simulations to discover and validate new theories. The experiments and tasks have given rise to the use of scientific workflow management systems. However, researchers often develop workflows from scratch, and there is no easy way to integrate various workflow systems and specifications. As a solution, we are developing an innovative approach that addresses scientific workflow management systems in a bottom-up manner: firstly from the operating systems and file systems side where the scientific workflow management systems must reside and interact, and finally to the functionality that the scientific workflow management systems must provide and the World Wide Web on which the scientific workflow management systems must operate. In the systems level, we extend and modify the operating system and file system through optimization techniques. In the applications-level, we examine the need to organize raw data and corresponding metadata alongside the interference of these data with existing computing resources. REACH PLATFORM -- REMOTE ACCESS TO SMART HOME FACILITY BASED COMPUTER SCIENCE LABORATORY Carl K. Chang, Hen-I Yang, Igors Svecs and Johnny Wong The purpose of the REACH (REmote ACcess to smart Home facility) platform is to allow students to learn about basic principles of computer science and software engineering practices, and gain hands-on experience through observable effects of the computing systems in a familiar setting (home). It utilizes virtualization to encourage group collaboration and grants anytime, anywhere access to the smart home facility. It incorporates dynamic binding capability that allows students to either use the sensors and actuators hardware they check out and install locally for development, or to conduct experiments in the smart home facility. Once the development is completed, the programs can be deployed remotely, and students can make observations through web cams strategically situated in the smart home facility and the logs of the system’s operations and users’ activities. The REACH platform is designed to support a large spectrum of computer science courses, from the equivalence of computer science lab 101, interdisciplinary projects, all the way to research projects in artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and human computer interactions.

THE DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF ONLINE LESSON UNITS FOR TEACHING VIRTUAL REALITY TO UNDERGRADUATES Daniel C Cliburn, James R Miller and Michael E Doherty Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting area of study with many contemporary applications in health care, art, training, and simulation. Unfortunately, virtual reality receives little coverage in the curriculum of most undergraduate institutions. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a series of flexible online lesson units for teaching virtual reality concepts to undergraduate students. Topics for the lesson units were chosen from the Computing Curricula 2001 recommendations for an elective course on Virtual Reality. The VR lesson units were evaluated through focus groups, student surveys, and assessment of student learning. The results of the evaluation have been positive and indicate that this approach does have the potential to achieve the goal of making VR accessible to undergraduate students without disrupting curricular structures. WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPING AND IMPLEMENTING AN INVERTED CLASSROOM FOR ENGINEERING STATICS Christopher Papadopoulos, Aidsa Santiago-Román and Genock Portela Motivated by other recent work, we developed, implemented, and began assessment of an Inverted Classroom model for Engineering Statics at UPRM. The model consists of (1) a set of pre-Lecture Modules and Exercises, delivered online; (2) a Lecture that responds to the students’ experience in the pre-Lecture activities, and (3) a Problem-Solving Session after each Lecture. Assessment results from a student survey and an administration of the Concept Assessment Tool for Statics (CATS) were generally positive. The class format, assessment methods, and assessment results are described. A discussion is also provided to indicate how the Inverted model might be implemented for use to unify the delivery of Statics at UPRM.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 139 Friday Sessions JUNIOR-LEVEL DESIGN EXPERIMENT IN A 10 WEEK ANALOG DESIGN COURSE Ding Luo and Donald Heer This paper presents a newly designed laboratory project for the Oregon State University (OSU) Electronics II course for junior-level electrical and computer engineering (ECE) students. The previous course was taught using common-place single session laboratory experiments and was not well received by students. An open-ended multi-solution laboratory project designed to boost students’ abilities on problem solving and innovation was chosen. The new laboratory project was developed to integrate design, communication, and system thinking into a single course. Integration of these soft-skills into the laboratory gives opportunities to use the skills in a technical context. This initial single term course better prepares students for later coursework. To assess the changes to this new laboratory, student pre and post surveys were used along side of laboratory observations. Topics of interest were student self-efficacy, student expectations of the laboratory, and student reflections on the course-laboratory connection. Results from the initial student self-efficacy survey results show an increase in student teamwork while the students’ expectations of the course showed provable trends. Student reflections show the most variability and give insights into what aspects of the course worked the best. Session F3G: Learning from the Past Chair: Julie Ellis, Western Kentucky University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon G INCONSISTENCIES IN STUDENTS' APPROACHES TO SOLVING PROBLEMS IN ENGINEERING STATICS Jeffrey L. Newcomer This paper looks at students' responses to two concept questions: one on equilibrium and one on equivalence, which is an equilibrium problem from a different perspective. Student responses were from final exam questions that included explanations and from national Statics Concept Inventory (SCI) data. Examination of students' explanations to these two questions shows that students are not consistent in their assessment of force and moment equilibrium, and a mapping of the explanations onto the answer distributions implies the same result is true for the national SCI data. The conclusion of this study is that most students are influenced by context when assessing equilibrium. WORK IN PROGRESS - USING A VISUAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TO BRIDGE THE COGNITIVE GAP BETWEEN A NOVICE'S MENTAL MODEL AND PROGRAM CODE Bryan J. Smith and Harry S Delugach Current research suggests that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory course, which has been taught predominately with textual and auditory lecturing. By primarily appealing to programming novices who prefer to understand visually, an understanding method not currently accommodated through the standard lecture style used in most classes, we develop a method that encourages communication of programming solutions. This method builds upon previous research that suggests that most engineering students are visual learners and we contribute that using a flow-model visual programming language will address important and difficult topics to novices of programming. We performed a pilot study using a knowledge modeling tool instead of using an existing visual programming tool to test this method, and share the program understanding results using this theory.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STUDENTS' CONCEPTUAL DATABASE FRAMEWORKS ACROSS UNIVERSITIES Nicole Anderson, Kirby McMaster and Samuel Sambasivam The purpose of this research is to examine the mental frameworks used by computer science students after their first semester of study of database systems. We explore the commonalities and differences in these frameworks across different universities and instructors. In addition, our research analyzes whether the students are able to consistently group important concepts within their frameworks. The questions this research aimed to answer include the following: As perceived by the students, what are the most important and least important concepts in the introductory DB course? How much do these perceptions vary among students, instructors, and institutions? Can we create a profile of important concepts for each course? And finally, how do students organize database concepts into a unified framework? We discovered that some database topics were universally considered important, while perceptions varied considerably for other concepts. We believe that other instructors may be able to use this method to identify and evaluate the mental frameworks they are presenting to their students.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 140 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - USING COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES IN TEACHING ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING CONCEPTS Mani Mina and Anthony W. Moore This paper reviews and presents efforts to add cognitive development for learning and verbalizing concepts, as well as the technical foundation and advanced body of knowledge in electrical engineering. We show examples of utilizing this process and bringing cognitive approaches to traditional electrical engineering courses. For effective delivery we need to modify our approach to help students create better mental representations of the core concepts. Practical examples are introduced to demonstrate how this can enhance the students thinking, learning, problems solving and help them become more effective lifelong learners. WORK IN PROGRESS - EXAMINING A FINISHED PRODUCT AS A METHOD FOR REINFORCEMENT OF CONCEPTS Robert A. Hogue A common method for teaching the normalization of relational database tables is to begin with definitions for various normal forms and to illustrate them by creating examples of tables that fail to meet those definitions. Such examples can be artificial and often contain only hypothetical data. This paper examines a reverse approach: starting with real-life tabular data discovered outside the context of databases and then relating that data to the definitions. The goal of this approach is to reinforce concepts without focusing solely on formal definitions presented without meaningful context. A variation of this approach, yet to be studied, would require the students to locate such data on a subject of interest to them. This alternate approach might be found to have the side effect of improving the understanding of the subject to which the data relates, as well as the meeting the original goal of reinforcing database concepts. Session F3H: Global Issues in Engineering II Chair: Reid Bailey, University of Virginia Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon H RECRUITMENT, MENTORING, AND DEVELOPMENT OF STEM FACULTY TO LEAD INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS Richard Vaz and Chrysanthe Demetry Faculty-led experiential study abroad is an increasingly popular vehicle for internationalizing STEM education. However, STEM faculty can lack the necessary knowledge and experience to lead study abroad programs, and may be reluctant to get involved. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, half of all STEM undergraduates complete interdisciplinary research projects abroad under faculty guidance, and over 25% of STEM faculty have some level of involvement in off-campus project programs. WPI’s faculty development approach involves recruitment, training, mentoring, and support. In this paper, we discuss strategies to engage and prepare STEM faculty to lead experiential study abroad programs that are scalable and sustainable. Examples are given of how overseas experiences can benefit faculty work on campus in teaching and scholarship.

ENGINEERING STUDENTS NEED TO LEARN TO TEACH James Trevelyan Practicing engineers, engineering faculty and students all conceive engineering practice in terms of solitary technical work, typically calculations contributing to problem solving and design. Research based on extensive interviews and field observations in four countries demonstrates that engineering practice has many other aspects, particularly ones involving social interactions such as technical coordination, organizing people to supply services, procurement, training, review, and checking. Many engineers regard these aspects as subordinate: not ‘real engineering’. Therefore it comes as no surprise that students resist being taught the social and professional skills they need for effective practice. The same research also shows that many aspects of engineering practice are closely related to teaching, particularly technical coordination and training. This creates an interesting opportunity to improve engineering education. If students learn effective teaching skills, first they will acquire social skills that will enable them to be more effective engineers, second they will learn the ‘real technical stuff’ better, and third they will amplify the total teaching effort available within a given engineering school, further improving overall learning outcomes. This paper offers practical suggestions for implementing such a strategy.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 141 Friday Sessions DEVELOPING GLOBAL COMPETENCE IN GRADUATE ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE STUDENTS THROUGH AN IGERT INTERNATIONAL INTERNSHIP PROGRAM Stephanie Cutler and Maura Borrego In this increasingly interconnected world, global competence is gaining increasing attention in higher education across many disciplines and in many countries. Graduates are increasingly expected to be able to work with collaborators and customers from different cultures. In this paper, we describe the experiences of fellows in one IGERT program who have each completed an international internship designed to address some of these issues. As part of program requirements for the EIGER IGERT at Virginia Tech, funded doctoral students in participating disciplines complete an international internship. These internships lasted for a varied period of time and in countries across Europe and Asia. Most were completed in academic or government laboratories, and most commonly students relied on their advisors’ contacts to find placements. Based on thematic analysis of interviews with seven recent participants in this program, we present evidence of learning outcomes achieved and evidence-based recommendations for similar programs. DOES CONTEXT MATTER? ENGINEERING STUDENTS' APPROACHES TO GLOBAL VS. LOCAL PROBLEMS Senay Purzer, Jing Chen and Aman Yadav While realistic projects make learning activities more authentic and contextualized, the context of the problem may affect how students approach the problem and what and how much they learn during the process. This study investigated how engineering students in dyads approached problems about clean water need differently when the problem was embedded in a local or a global context. Differences in both solutions and information gathering behaviors were evident. Dyads solving the problem with a global context started their process by researching information about the location. They also gathered information about the water quality, water resources, and weather at this location. Dyads solving the problem with a local context started their information gathering by researching information on average water consumption by humans. Findings from this qualitative study can be used to inform future studies that employ design experimentation methods. SUGARCANE AND CORN: BIOFUEL-BASED STUDY ABROAD PROGRAMS IN BRAZIL Denise Wilson, Jennifer Johnson, Leah Freed, Rebecca Bates and Donna Frostholm This paper discusses observations and affective qualities of student experiences in a three-week (short-term) study-abroad program in Brazil entitled "The Biofuels Puzzle: Exploring the Food, Water, Fuel Triangle." In this 2009 study-abroad course conducted through the University of Washington (UW) Exploration Seminars program, a team of four program leaders, from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, led a group of 21 students (14 in engineering) to south-central Brazil. The 6-credit course and the description provided in this paper look at academic, cultural, and field aspects of the program, observations of student experiences, and affective self-report from students in the program. Student survey data for connection to community and individual capacity were analyzed for this paper to compare (1) students who participated in this program with those who did not go abroad and (2) engineering and non-technical students in the program. Engineering students, in their written work, show more and deeper consideration of the broader impacts of a chosen technology in the global picture while studying off-campus (compared to on-campus work). All of the results support the positive benefit of enabling engineering students to study abroad, especially if the content of their study emphasizes technology and its impact on society. Session F3J: Applications for Student Support and Retention Chair: Mustafa Sualp, Untra Academic Management Solutions, LLC. Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm Salon J MODELING THE ECONOMIC COST OF INADEQUATE TEACHING AND MENTORING David L. Soldan, William P. Osborne and Don Gruenbacher The primary activity of this project has been to develop economic models giving the universities tools needed to understand and quantify the value of faculty accomplishments in teaching, mentoring, and advising. These tools will augment their existing tools for tracking funded research thus providing a more balanced view of the values of each activity. This understanding will provide the rational for properly rewarding excellent faculty accomplishments in student interactions, hence encouraging the efforts needed to retain more students. There is great value to the school, the institution and the nation, in faculty who provide excellent student services in and out of the classroom, but it is difficult to quantify these accomplishments economically for various reasons including limited access to university budgets. This often means high achieving faculty in research funding are given much greater rewards by the school than high achieving faculty in the area of student experiences. This disparity of rewards results in a faculty culture which undervalues faculty accomplishments for undergraduate students and fails to understand the economic impact 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 142 Friday Sessions of poor retention. CLOSING THE HOMEWORK FEEDBACK LOOP, AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO HOMEWORK GRADING James Bluman, Matthew Rowland and Eric Mockensturm This paper studies an alternative grading method for homework assignments designed to increase student learning and motivation. The method emphasizes correct completion of student work, even if multiple turn-ins are required. After submitting homework, the instructor checks the accuracy of the work. Incorrect work is returned to the students the morning after its initial due date. Students are then given a day or two to correct their work and re-submit. This cycle is repeated as many times as necessary at the teacher’s discretion. Grades are based on the number of iterations required for the work to be correct. Results from the study show that while student learning was not measurably affected, student motivation to perform well on the homework assignments increased. This rise in motivation may be dependent on the context within which the method is employed—it seems to work better for higher level technical electives than for larger common courses. ADWIKI: DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A SOCIO-TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ADVISING FRESHMEN ENGINEERING STUDENTS Aditya Johri, Jenny Lo, Monique Dufour and Daniel Shanahan Recent studies demonstrate that inadequate undergraduate advising often contributes to engineering students switching out of their majors. In this paper we present findings from a project undertaken to design and implement a web-based advising system for first-year engineering students. The advising system, AdWiki, has been accessed over 6425 times by over 1260 students since its full implementation. AdWiki was created to address three major issues in advising: (1) heavy faculty advising responsibility in the department, (2) lack of appropriate faculty rewards for time and effort spent on advising, and (3) inefficient uses of advising resources. Were recognized a need for a technology-based solution, one that was useful, usable, and sustainable. To achieve this objective, we turned to theoretical literature on the design and use of technology and approached our project through the socio-technical perspective. This perspective recommends a holistic and humanistic approach to design, where technology is just one element of a larger system. AdWiki has seen tremendous usage since full deployment, which we believe is a result of our approach. In this paper, we discuss our theory-guided approach to system design and present assessment and usage data to support our process and findings. THE USE OF COMPETENCES ASSESSMENT TO PREDICT THE PERFORMANCE OF FIRST YEAR STUDENTS Edmundo Tovar and Oliver Soto Students’ performance in the development of their academic career depends on their input level for a core of key competences that they have already developed in the secondary education level. In 2008-09 we led a project called “Comparative study about the level of the development of generic competences in newcomer students of Computer Engineering” with the participation of other schools from Spain and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. In this paper we have extended and revised a previous work in which we developed a predictive model to avoid early desertion of studies. Our model uses the student performance in the competences tests to predict the future performance along their courses. With this improved version of the model we have observed with new data from a fresh sample that our model and studies like ours can provide a vivid figure of how students will perform in the future. It can help education policy makers and professors to improve their teaching techniques and to provide the proper tools to those students that need them the most. WORK IN PROGRESS - ON TUTORING AND ADVISING ENGINEERING STUDENTS USING NLP Rodolfo Salinas-Villarreal First year college students are often subject to encounter academic difficulties in the transition from high school to college. Immaturity and other distractions avoid them to focus and efficiently use their time while studying, affecting directly their level of concentration and understanding. In engineering degrees, it is common to see that students have trouble with the change in level of academic responsibility and difficulty understanding more advanced mathematical terms. Part of the learning process consists of tutoring sessions that provide communication between the student and instructor both in academic and non-academic terms. This paper presents the progress of a recently introduced tutoring program for first year undergraduate engineering students based on using neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) tools and techniques. The main goal is that students learn how to use the different modes of processing information in their learning experience: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, therefore raising the level of efficiency, performance and consciousness in students during their studies. Providing assessment and guidance from the beginning will make them aware of certain ways to improve their learning and solve other problems during all their

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 143 Friday Sessions studies in order and become more successful graduates. Session F4A: Mini Workshop - Understanding Motivation in Research and Practice Chair: Jenefer Husman, Arizona State University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon A MINI WORKSHOP - UNDERSTANDING MOTIVATION IN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE Jenefer Husman, Lisa Benson and Sarah Brem Improving recruitment and retention of students into the engineering disciplines as well as enhancing their learning experience is a high priority amongst engineering educators. To be successful, we cannot focus solely on providing high-quality content, but also how students approach such content—that is, we must consider students’ motivation, and how their experiences in engineering education can shape their motivation. However, applying motivation research to engineering education can be quite daunting; there are many theories to master, each of which tackles different aspects of student motivation, and which can be difficult to integrate. What is needed is a guide that helps engineering education researchers and practitioners identify the theories that show considerable promise for engineering education and demonstrate how they might be applied, in theory and in practice. In this session, we will present three theories of motivation: self-efficacy, goal orientation, and future time perspective. We will provide a mini-lecture on each, and then work with the session participants to apply them to research questions and practical problems identified by the participants themselves. Participants will receive several instruments they can use in their own research and classrooms, as well as a brief bibliography covering each theory. Session F4B: Special Session - Connecting and Expanding the Engineering Education Research Community Chair: Karl Smith, Purdue University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - CONNECTING AND EXPANDING THE ENGINEERING EDUCATION RESEARCH COMMUNITY Karl A Smith and Ruth A Streveler Several universities have established or are considering establishing engineering education research centers and PhD programs. The aim of this special session is to provide an opportunity for representatives of established engineering education research programs to network with one another, to welcome representatives from emerging programs, and to provide guidance to colleagues who are considering establishing centers and PhD programs. Colleagues from established programs are encouraged to bring descriptions of their programs to distribute, and to be prepared to help others establish engineering education research programs. The session is open to everyone who is interested in fostering the continued development of the engineering education research community. We propose to utilize the occasion to brainstorm new and innovative ideas for improving the intellectual climate in engineering education research programs, as well as identify ways to continue to network. We will set up a space on the Collaboratory for Engineering Education Research (CLEERhub.org) where we will post the program descriptions (and links). We will encourage session participants to review the materials that are posted prior to the Special Session. We will encourage participants to use CLEERhub.org as a means for following up after the session. Session F4C: Courseware Technologies II Chair: Needs a Chair Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - USING PODCASTING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Jennifer A. Polack-Wahl Podcasting allow students to learn outside the boundaries of the classroom and without time constraints. Podcasting is an audio broadcast that has been converted to an audio file format for playback over the Internet or in a digital music player. Podcasting cannot replace the classroom; however, it gives students a new way to broadcast concepts they have learned and allows educators to interact with their students. In a computer information system and software engineering course, podcasting was used to add value to the in-classroom experience and enhance course content. In both classes groups of students were required to investigate real-world software failures and produce a fifteen-minute podcast that demonstrated the failure and its impact on society. This work-in-progress will discuss how students used podcasting to understand how course content applied in the real world and how they could effectively communicate this knowledge to the rest of the class without taking class time and finally, how the students improved their teamwork skills by participating in the group podcasting assignment. 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 144 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - BIOMEDICAL AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING METHODS (BEEM) Xiaoyan Mu, Deborah Walter and Huihui Xu There is a need at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) to increase the fundamental design, measurement, and laboratory skills for both Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering students. Our project aims to improve students’ design and practical problem solving skills, increase student interest in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Biomedical Engineering (BE), and strengthen students’ lab skills. In this project, we will be developing a web-based repository of worked circuit design examples; real world application demos of electrical circuits which visualize active, hands-on learning; and video-based tutorials for electrical circuit laboratory exercises. MIGRATION OF A ROBOTICS PLATFORM FROM A FRESHMAN INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING COURSE SEQUENCE TO A SOPHOMORE CIRCUITS COURSE Davis Harbour and Paul Hummel Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, Louisiana Tech University has implemented a new freshman engineering sequence of three courses focused on boosting hands-on learning, student confidence and innovation. Every engineering student purchases a robotics kit with a programmable microcontroller, sensors, servos and software along with a toolkit to provide the basis for a mobile laboratory and design platform. An aspect of this Phase II CCLI grant involves the migration of components from the freshmen sequence into our sophomore engineering sequence of courses comprised of statics, circuits and thermodynamics. Three laboratory exercises have been developed for the sophomore circuits course utilizing the robotics platform from the freshman sequence. These three exercises provide additional practice in using hardware and tools introduced in the freshman year and provide important hands-on applications to support fundamental concepts covered in an introductory circuits course. This paper presents details of the three exercises that have been developed, faculty training activities and assessment results. POWER ELECTRONICS HOMEWORK PROBLEM SOLVER ON THE CLICK Khalid S. Al-Olimat The field of Power Electronics plays an important role in industry as well as in our day-to-day life. They are used in power plants to generate electrical power and in industry to provide mechanical work. They are an indispensable part of our daily lives. The power electronics area has been and will continue to be amongst the most important fundamental courses of the electrical engineering curriculum. To enhance students learning in the area of power electronics, homework problem solver software has been developed at Ohio Northern University (ONU). This paper explores both the modules of the developed Power Electronics Problem Solver software and the assessment results of an investigation of learners’ attitude toward this media based teaching tool. This software is one that the students can install it on their personal computers and be able to run it as a standalone program that doesn’t need the assistance of any other software. This program utilizes C# and Graphical User Interface (GUI) that provides a user friendly platform for entering all of the data necessary to perform the calculations and instantly receive the outcomes of those calculations. As a helpful learning tool, this program instantly shows the effects that changing one input has on every different aspect of the output and also makes it possible for students to check their homework answers. The modules include DC-DC converters (buck, boost, buck-boost), power supplies (forward converters and flyback converters), DC-AC inverters. The assessment results are based on a survey completed by eighteen students enrolled in the course. The information and data collected from the survey were analyzed and used for the evaluation of Students’ attitudes toward the use of this media based teaching tool. Students have responded favorably to and expressed their satisfaction with the developed software tool. WORK IN PROGRESS - A SUITE OF GOOGLE SERVICES FOR DAILY COURSE EVALUATION Edward F. Gehringer and W. Tyler Cross In almost all institutions, students are asked to evaluate the quality of instruction on end-of-semester surveys. Unfortunately, these come too late to affect the quality of instruction in the current semester. They are essentially summative—evaluating what has already happened, mostly for the benefit of third parties, rather than formative—providing information that an instructor can use to improve teaching in the current class. Now, with the advent of freely accessible tools for taking Web surveys, it is easy to obtain formative feedback. This paper reports on a suite of Google forms and Google spreadsheets, along with a Google app for visualizing the results. These Google tools can be used to solicit feedback daily from a set of students in the class. This helps the instructor to keep tabs on how the students react to each class session, and compare the results with the feedback from previous class sessions.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 145 Friday Sessions Session F4D: Service-Learning Models, Motivations, and Outcomes Chair: Laura Hahn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS – ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD AND OPEN SOURCE; A UNIQUE APPROACH TO SERVICE EDUCATION Stephen Jacobs In January 2009, the Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) Lab for Technological Literacy (LTL) and Department of Interactive Games and Media (IGM) offered a seminar around the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Sugar educational platforms. The goals of the seminar were to create games and teaching materials to support 4th grade math curricula while teaching the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development tools and processes. Over the three sessions that the seminar was offered, the beginnings of a complete educational ecology began to emerge. Students who had completed the course came back on their own-time to mentor new students and encourage them to continue work on the projects that had emerged in a previous course session. This paper will examine the course content, the factors that came together to form this emerging ecology and the next steps needed to formalize it within the institution. WORK IN PROGRESS–RECRUITING HISPANIC STUDENTS INTO COMPUTING THROUGH COMMUNITY SERVICE LEARNING Patricia Backer and Belle Wei The San José State University College of Engineering implemented a new approach for recruiting Hispanic students into computing disciplines and careers through the Hispanic Computer Brigade (HCB) initiative. To support the HCB, we received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a one-year pilot program for Hispanic students from the San Jose East Side Union High School District. The high school students began the program with a summer camp in Summer 2009, continued to learn and engage computing throughout the 2009-2010 academic year with community service learning, and will end with a local event where students will share their computing projects with high school faculty, SJSU faculty, parents/guardians, and the community. Students are learning computer and programming skills and processes in weekly meetings with the help of high school teachers and San Jose State University student mentors.

CONNECTING CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY THROUGH WEB DEVELOPMENT SERVICE-LEARNING PROJECTS Amalia Rusu and Jennifer Lawlor In this paper we present a service learning course offered in Software Engineering Department at Fairfield University, which links two opposite cities together for good reasons. Web Development is a one-semester course required for undergraduate students and part of the Web Applications track for the graduate program. Currently, it operates with the service learning designation in the undergraduate catalog and annually being revised by university’s Office of Service Learning. The course stresses web site design, current web technologies, and client-side scripting languages, including a class project. The paper discusses the service learning framework of the course, with the major role played by the project. The root of our approach is the belief that the best way of learning in engineering is by doing and the best way of doing is by actively participating in the community. Two case studies in which the web development projects have been paired with local community partners are first presented and the outcomes and success of them are later discussed. WORK IN PROGRESS - SHIFTING CONTEXTS: INVESTIGATING IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS Annette Berndt and Carla Paterson To inform curricular change in accordance with accreditation criteria, interviews were conducted with engineering students currently active in Engineers Without Borders to ascertain why some engineering students are more interested in the social context of engineering than others. A thematic content analysis of interview transcripts revealed two sets of results: common personal characteristics among interviewees that led to the development of a capacity for empathy and recommendations for curricular change. A critical discourse analysis adds a third set of results that focus on interviewee references to “the self” and “the other.” Preliminary findings indicate that engineering students require co-/curricular opportunities that enable them to identify with “the other” facilitated by shifts in social context. It is argued that student engagement with shifting contexts contributes to identity transformation from technical problem-solver to “global engineer.”

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 146 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - CAPTURING THE LEARNING IN SERVICE-LEARNING Mandy Bratton Like its predecessor, EPICS, the Global TIES - Teams in Engineering Service Program at the University of California, San Diego, provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to earn academic credit for active participation in faculty-advised, vertically-integrated, multidisciplinary teams that design, build, test, and deploy solutions to technology-based problems faced by non-profit organizations. Like other service-learning programs, particularly those funded in part by grants and donations, Global TIES strives to document its impact on participants in rigorous and persuasive ways. This paper builds on the work of the EPICS program and outlines the work to date of designing and validating an instrument to assess student development on the evaluation criteria established by ABET. The scale yields quantitative data on student self-efficacy in engineering. These data can be analyzed utilizing inferential statistics, which allow one to test hypotheses and find statistically significant differences between groups and within groups over time. Session F4E: Gender Issues Chair: Dan Budny, University of Pittsburgh Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon K WORK IN PROGRESS - WOMEN IN COMPUTING HONORS COURSE Yana Kortsarts We present our experience in teaching Honors course Women in Computing that was offered for the first time in Fall 2009. The course is cross listed with Women’s Studies and provides Honors students with interdisciplinary experience. This course provides an opportunity for students to learn about pioneering women of computing and their contribution into computing field, as well as modern trends and modern gender issues in computer science. The course also introduces students to the world of computing by linking various computer science concepts to the specific contribution. This course brings together undergraduate Honors students from different majors and creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration through the in-class laboratory assignments and team projects. Part of the value of the course experience is in the blending of student expertise in the formation of teams.

WORK IN PROGRESS - FLEXIBILITY AND CAREER OPPORTUNITY AS MOTIVATION FOR WOMEN SELECTING INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING MAJORS Catherine E. Brawner, Sharron A. Frillman, Susan M. Lord and Matthew W. Ohland This work in progress explores qualitatively why women choose to major in industrial engineering and remain there. Through two focus groups with undergraduate women industrial engineering majors at an historically black university and a predominantly white institution, we found these primary themes. 1) Students chose their institution for its reputation. 2) Students chose to major in industrial engineering because they believed it a) was less technical and more like business, b) had a wide range of job opportunities and c) offered the chance to work more with people. 3) Students remained in their major because of the caring and passionate faculty in their departments. Future work will seek to confirm these findings at an additional institution and explore in more depth the similarities and differences among institutions.

THIS ENGINEERING WHICH IS NOT ONE: ENCOUNTERING IRIGARAY IN HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER Donna Riley and Lionel Claris In a Heat and Mass Transfer class, seven female junior and senior engineering students were engaged with a rare, contentious, but potentially empowering feminist critique of fluid mechanics. French thinker Luce Irigaray’s “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” was taught as part of an NSF-funded project implementing liberative pedagogies in engineering education. The goals of engaging students with Irigaray’s argument were to encourage them (1) to think critically about fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and gender in engineering; (2) to learn to situate themselves within what is traditionally a male-oriented discourse, and take some ownership over it as a form of liberation; and (3) to re-imagine feminist engineering approaches to heat and mass transfer as a form of reflective action. We first motivate our approach of teaching engineering methods and their critiques in dialogue. We then introduce the work’s theoretical positions in the context of later feminist critiques and describe how it can be in dialogue with engineering and that in spite surface readings to the contrary. THE FEMININE SIDE OF ENGINEERING: IT’S WAY MORE THAN JUST "GIRL TALK!" Teresa L. Larkin and Caitlyn M. Quinn Historically, engineering has been widely thought of as a field of study best suited for men. In fact, the masculine face that engineering often assumes has overshadowed, and in some respects, continues to overshadow the concept of

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 147 Friday Sessions the engineer in many people’s minds. While this conception has prevailed historically, in recent decades, the feminine face of the engineer has slowly emerged. This paper will examine some of the barriers common to women considering a career in engineering along with a discussion of how these barriers have been, and continue to be surpassed. The "glass ceiling,” a metaphorical barrier that is often seen to prevent qualified women from advancing to leadership positions in science and engineering, will be discussed. Effective methods and strategies that have been developed by various professional organizations will be shared. This sharing will include a conversation with Eleanor Baum, the first female dean of engineering in the United States. This conversation provides an example of one woman’s efforts to help crack the glass ceiling. Directions for future research that will explore factors that could explicate the low numbers of women in science and engineering will be summarized. WORK IN PROGRESS - IDENTIFYING UNDERGRADUATE COURSES WHICH DEVELOP AND ENHANCE SPATIAL ABILITIES Susan K. Donohue One skill set important to student success in engineering studies is spatial abilities; consequently, research in the assessment of skill levels and methods of improving weaknesses is robust. As part of our preliminary investigation into research questions regarding the impact of various teaching/learning methods on the development and enhancement of spatial abilities for different student demographics, we administered a survey of undergraduates at two institutions in an effort to identify courses they believe are effective in achieving those objectives. The survey results affirm the efficacy of both CAD instruction and technical drawing in developing and enhancing spatial abilities as reported in earlier studies. The latter finding is especially robust among one institution’s female students. This result motivates further research into the specific contributions of technical drawing activities to the development and enhancement of spatial abilities in general in females. The re-investigation of “old school” interventions may be of particular interest to P-12 engineering educators working with constrained resources. Session F4F: Innovative Learning Chair: Lisa D. McNair, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon E & F WORK IN PROGRESS - ULTRA-LOW POWER AND THE MILLENNIUM GENERATION Antonio F. Mondragon-Torres Millennials are a generation of young people currently in training at universities and colleges, and entering the workforce. They have several characteristics that could potentially make them one of the most productive generations ever. On the other hand the concepts of sustainability and energy awareness are part of their vocabulary and most of the jobs will be related to these terms. This work relates an attempt to tailor a microcomputers course to appeal to this generation of students. What we have found is that the traditional teaching formulas have to be adapted to make them usable by millennials who do not know a world without internet, wireless communications and social networking.

STUDENTS' WORKING STRATEGIES AND OUTCOMES IN A CREATIVITY-SUPPORTING LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Mikko Apiola, Matti Lattu and Tomi A. Pasanen This paper describes results from a teaching experiment at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, in which we studied students’ different working strategies and tried to find patterns between these strategies and the creativity of the students’ work. In a typical computer science course in Finland, the teaching is quite strictly structured and the support structures (e.g. lectures, lab sessions) are highly teacher-driven. In contrast, our intention was to create a learning environment where the support structures would focus on supporting creativity to bring forth new ideas and innovation. We were especially interested in the working strategies that students would use outside our learning sessions, the students´ outcomes with regards to creativity, and the interplay between working strategies and the creativity of the outcomes. To put our ideas into practice, we designed a pilot course utilizing practices from research into creativity and intrinsic motivation. To answer our research questions we interviewed all course attendees (n=33) twice, at the beginning and at the end of the course. We chose LEGO® Mindstorms robots as the platform for the project. While further studies are needed, our preliminary results suggest that there is a pattern between working strategy and creativity. A STRATEGY TO IMPROVE STUDENT'S MOTIVATION LEVELS IN PROGRAMMING COURSES Scheila Wesley Martins, Antonio Jose Mendes and Antonio Dias Figueiredo In this paper we present and discuss a pedagogical strategy to promote programming learning. It was conceived to help students maximize their learning through the conscious assessment of their self-efficacy level, while they develop a suitable programming study behavior. We present and discuss the results of a two years experience

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 148 Friday Sessions conducted in the context of a Programming course at the University of Coimbra. In those experiences we used several instruments to assess different aspects, like motivation, self-efficacy and satisfaction with course activities and demonstrate an alternative model to make introductory programming courses more productive and attractive, increase motivation for learning and decrease dropout levels among students. DESIGN OF COMBINATIONAL LOGIC TRAINING SYSTEM USING FPGA Sujittra Sothong and Pornpimon Chayratsami This paper describes a design of a training system for a combinational logic design course. The goals of this design are to reduce a cost of the system and to lower the lost and damage of TTL elements used in a digital laboratory currently. The system uses a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) as a processor containing basic logic gates, and uses a microcontroller as a gate selector. The training system consists of a system unit base, 17 basic logic gate models, and 10 lab sheets. The system is evaluated in terms of quality and using suitability of the system by experts and instructors who work with technical schools in Thailand and have been involving and teaching a combinational logic design course for at least 5 years. The results show that the system is rated to have a very good quality and is suitable for being used as a training system in a combinational logic course with inexpensive cost. WORK IN PROGRESS - TEACHING NETWORKING CONCEPTS THROUGH BLUETOOTH SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION Suleyman Uludag and Brian McBride The objective of this work-in-progress project is to develop complementary computer science networking laboratory exercises to reinforce the theoretical topics by means of active learning based on the ubiquitous Bluetooth wireless communications technology. The main advantages of our approach are: (1) Bluetooth is used everywhere and students would find it a very tangible and relevant learning tool, (2)The full software implementation in C++ is available from Broadcom (major Bluetooth manufacturer) that contains a majority of the main protocol functions with respect to the seven OSI layers, (3) No special equipment other than the low cost Bluetooth adapters are needed. This makes it very easy to sustain, reconfigure and maintain for a rich learning environment. (4) Bluetooth technology will enable to teach theoretical networking concepts as well as fundamental programming concepts. The labs will facilitate the students’ learning at comprehension, application, synthesis and evaluation levels of cognition based on the classical taxonomy of cognitive levels by Bloom. The deliverables of this project include student lab exercises as well as instructor manuals for easy deployment at other institutions. We have already used the first set of labs successfully in a networking course at the U of Michigan - Flint. Session F4G: Enhancing theFirst Year in STEM Disciplines Chair: Mercedes A. Rivero Hudec, University of Rhode Island Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon G RESEARCH TO PRACTICE: USING RESEARCH FINDINGS TO INFORM THE FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING EXPERIENCE Heather Watson, Olga Pierrakos and Tiffany Newbold Meaningful experiences in the first year of an engineering curriculum are known to motivate students and help student retention in engineering. On-going research in the School of Engineering is aimed at understanding the formation of an engineering identity in students, as well as classifying and assessing problem-based learning practices embodied throughout the curriculum. Investigations were conducted with the inaugural freshman engineering class using interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Analyses of the collected data provided beneficial insight into students’ formative exposure to engineering, attitudes toward engineering, and learning experiences with the Introduction to Engineering course. Key findings from this data were then used to implement enhancements to the freshman engineering experience for our students. This paper describes how results of these research activities have been incorporated into practices within the engineering program. More specifically, how the findings were used to incorporate a focus on the profession in the Introduction to Engineering course, guide the creation of a new engineering seminar course, and supplement the freshman advising process. The types of changes implemented herein are relevant to introductory freshman engineering courses nationwide and across specific disciplines. WORK IN PROGRESS - APPLICATION OF MASTERY LEARNING IN AN INTRODUCTORY MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS COURSE William J. Leonard and William J. Gerace A Mastery approach for learning Engineering Circuit Analysis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA) has been successfully implemented, with more than 200 students experiencing the approach. It has yet to be demonstrated if the Mastery Learning approach can be successfully implemented in a different field of study. At the

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 149 Friday Sessions University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), many students enter their first year underprepared for both physics and calculus. Therefore, we have created a one-semester course to help students develop the skills needed to succeed in these courses. In this Work-in-Progress, we will summarize the Mastery approach as well as the circumstances that led the Department of Physics and Astronomy to offer this course. We will describe the course and its first implementation during Fall 2009, and we will look at some preliminary results, including students’ performance in and attitudes toward the course. Finally, we will make a case for implementing this course for all engineering and science majors, specifically, everyone who plans on taking physics as part of their college major. MACHINE SHOP TRAINING WITH A MUSICAL NOTE Michael W. Prairie and R. Danner Friend Norwich University recently added a hands-on machine shop training activity to the introductory engineering course with the goal of teaching basic shop tool skills while stimulating interest in the exercise by creating a useful object. The object, a simple flute, was designed to have three parts made from machinable wax rods that would require the students to learn and perform basic operations on a milling machine, a lathe, and a drill press. Using tutorial instructions, mechanical drawings, and minimal prefabricated parts, students were able to create a working musical instrument during one three-hour laboratory session. The students were also introduced to the idea that the flute’s acoustical design can be modeled on the principles of electrical transmission lines. Options to include a design activity as well as a mechanical drawing component to the project are also discussed. WORK IN PROGRESS – ENGINEERING A CONTEXT-BASED COLLEGE ALGEBRA COURSE Krystal Corbett, James Nelson, Heath Tims and Galen Turner An apparent trend in university mathematics courses is that students approach mathematical problems methodically without understanding the context. A large contributor to this trend is the lack of true connections with real applications in most college-level algebra courses. For those students pursuing a STEM degree, this disconnect is often perpetuated in later courses in their major. Evidence suggests re-designing College Algebra content to become more context-based could promote a deeper understanding and eliminate the disconnect between fundamentals and applications. Developing the course would involve a structural redesign, creating a different flow of topics while simultaneously relating them to real applications.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FRESHMAN ENGINEERING PROJECT IN ENERGY SCAVENGING Yanfei Liu and Carlos Pomalaza-Ráez Energy scavenging from the environment is a contemporary topic that positively benefits society. This paper describes the development and implementation of an energy scavenging project that uses piezoelectric material. In the fall of 2009, this project was implemented in an introduction to engineering course with over one hundred students from four different engineering disciplines: civil, computer, electrical, and mechanical. Survey results and students’ reflection papers showed that the project was appealing to the students and helped them understand several basic concepts as well as principles of the engineering design process. Session F4H: Motivating Students to Pursue Engineering Chair: Wendy Otoupal-Hylton, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon H WORK IN PROGRESS - CHALLENGES IN DESIGNING AN ASSESSMENT SCHEME FOR A DIVERSE COHORT OF STUDENTS Vasantha Aravinthan Designing an assessment scheme for a diverse cohort of students having different backgrounds and competencies is a challenge in itself. A case study on a course titled “Environmental technology” delivered in the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying at University of Southern Queensland in Australia is an example that depicts this challenge. This paper reports a critical analysis undertaken using the available data to understand the diverse characteristics of the students in terms of their majors and programs, their corresponding performance in the assessment and finally the interpretation of how their performance is related to their majors and programs. Having critically reviewed the existing assessment practices along with the students’ feedback, a new assessment strategy is proposed that can influence the students’ approaches to learning from surface to deep learning and that takes into account the diverse nature of the students.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 150 Friday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS – TAKING ONE FOR THE TEAM: GOAL ORIENTATION AND GENDER-CORRELATED TASK DIVISION Benjamin Linder, Mark Somerville, Ozgur Eris and Nick Tatar Assessments of student behavior in first-semester design experiences suggest that early team-based design projects can promote a team performance goal orientation that undermines students’ learning goals. In particular, we find that gender-correlated division of work can easily and unconsciously occur in these teams and that performance-oriented teams may be more likely to undermine womens’ learning goals then mens’ learning goals. We propose mechanisms to explain the effect and present results of promising interventions. AMBASSADOR PROGRAM FOR RECRUITING GIRLS INTO ENGINEERING―APPROPRIATE MESSAGES, MESSENGERS, AND MODES OF DELIVERY Melissa Marshall, Michael Alley, Sarah Zappe, Karen A. Thole, Mary Frecker and Renata S. Engel Although women make up more than half of the U.S. population, the percentage of women entering engineering is much lower. To address this discrepancy, the College of Engineering at Penn State has initiated an Engineering Ambassador Program that sends female engineering undergraduates to give talks in science and math classes within Pennsylvania high schools and middle schools. The main goal of these talks is to clarify what engineers do. What distinguishes our program are the specific messages in the talks and the presentation style of our ambassadors. The messages of our program’s talks come from recommendations in the recent text Changing the Conversation [1]. The primary presentation style that our ambassadors rely on is an assertion−evidence style taught in a special presentations course [2]. Evaluations of the presentations by almost 500 students at six different schools across Pennsylvania (including two all-girls schools) indicate that the presentations are highly successful at communicating the messages. More powerful evidence for the efficacy of this program lies in the volunteered responses of girls to these presentations. WORK IN PROGRESS – INVESTIGATING BEST PRACTICES IN THE RESEARCH MENTORING OF UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITY STUDENTS IN ENGINEERING Jessica M Yellin, Cheryl Allendoerfer and Allison Kang Few empirical investigations are available on the effectiveness of best practices in mentoring underrepresented minority undergraduate and graduate students in engineering research. We are collecting and analyzing narratives from 200 underrepresented minority participants on their personal experiences with research mentoring in engineering. Participants describe a specific, powerful, and memorable interaction with a research mentor that they found to influence their academic choices or career decisions. Interactions may be positive or negative. Findings will be used to develop resources for research mentors to improve mentoring. WORK IN PROGRESS - UNITED STATES COAST GUARD ACADEMY ROBOTICS ON WATER - NEW PROGRAM FOR STEM & DIVERSITY OUTREACH Jonathan Russell, Kassim Tarhini and Hudson Jackson A new robotics one-day program, Coast Guard Academy Robotics On Water (CGAROW), was developed at the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) as an outreach tool to encourage high school student interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). The program involves having students work in teams to build a robotic water craft that is used in a competition simulating several Coast Guard mission oriented tasks. Pilot implementations were done at several high schools in Puerto Rico and in the United States. Work is still ongoing in revising the program; however, the overall feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive. The authors present details of the development and pilot implementation of the CGAROW program. This program has already shown potential as an effective STEM outreach tool. Session F4J: Global Issues in Engineering III Chair: Eric W. Johnson, Valparaiso University Time: Friday, October 29, 2010, 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm Salon J PREPARING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS FOR GLOBAL WORKFORCES: COMPARISONS BETWEEN ENGINEERING AND BUSINESS SCHOOL STUDENTS Gisele Ragusa There is a growing concern among universities that students in undergraduate and graduate engineering and business programs will be unprepared or underprepared to work in global workforces. In their 2005 publication, Engineers for 2020, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) urged university engineering schools nationwide to embed curriculum and assessment measures into academic programs that provide opportunities and associated assessment metrics to meet this international challenge. Specifically, the NAE charges universities and colleges to prepare

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 151 Friday Sessions engineers that are leaders in global engineering fields with strong communication, leadership and interdisciplinary research, and professional skills in diverse in engineering environments. Businesses, and business school have similar globally focused charges. This paper describes a university’s response to an important challenge of preparing students for global workforces. This paper describes assessment metrics related to preparedness for working in diverse globally focused engineering and business contexts. In this study, engineering and business school students received interdisciplinary globally focused training via their coursework, research and international field experiences and were assessed as to their preparedness to work in global workforces, research, and diverse environments. Accordingly, global preparedness index was developed and administered to assess the impact of diverse educational and research experiences summatively. Results of this important assessment metric were compared across programs and to students’ course grades, work related efficacy, international field experiences and outcomes-based academic program success. Results of this research indicate that engineering and business students who were most globally prepared were also most efficacious, had international experiences, and received higher grades in courses. Additionally, diversity in preparedness among the subscales of the index was noted, suggesting that students with diverse socio-demographic profiles had diverse preparedness indices. WORK IN PROGRESS - GOING GLOBAL: AN INNOVATIVE COURSE FOR SOPHOMORES Ronald Rosenberg Twenty-first-century engineers will be practicing their profession in an increasingly globalized world. The changing nature of engineering practice calls for accompanying relevant changes in engineering education. In partial response to this imperative we have developed the course GOING GLOBAL. The course is part of a recently re-designed curriculum for our Applied Engineering Science undergraduate major, a broadly-based cross-disciplinary program in the College of Engineering. The primary audience for the course is engineering sophomores. In this paper we describe our goals for the course, the current course design and implementation, and course impact on learning outcomes from our experiences in fall 2008 with twenty students and in fall 2009 with forty students. Anecdotal data suggest that the learning goals are being met effectively.

QUALITY AND INNOVATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: CODE OF GOOD PRACTICES Inmaculada Plaza, Francisco Arcega, Francisco Ibañez, Piedad Garrido and Manuel Castro This project started as an initiative of a group of university teachers, trying to fulfill the quality requirements requested by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) for the university system. During two years, they developed a Code of Good Teaching Practices for the Technical area, which intends to achieve excellence teaching competences and to meet quality criteria. The authors decided to elaborate the Code based on a “mixed model”, using diverse standards with the aid of different guides and models. Now several improvements should be implemented. The main idea is the introduction of the concept of innovation. The paper shows several standards widely used in the entrepreneurial environment that could be adapted to the lecture rooms and discusses their integration in the previous Code. Their application will allow extracting ideas for improving traditional working methods. In this way, they can be considered as a tool or an element for innovation in Higher Education. The final Code of Good Teaching Practices won’t be specific to a particular engineering subject or degree, so it could be used by other university teachers. ICT EDUCATION AND COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT - IMPACT AND CONTEXTUALIZATION Mikko Vesisenaho People frequently use Information and Communication Technology (ICT), but are the users from developing countries only expensive consumers? To what extend is ICT education and its applications used for meeting the needs of society and the opportunities of development? Contextualization is a key term designed to make ICT and computer science (CS) content more familiar, understandable and applicable. It is intended to meet the local needs. This paper focuses on the different impact levels of technological development projects and ICT and CS education. We present a conference review of existing research on contextual approaches of CS and ICT education in Africa, and introduce a contextual and sustainable approach in ICT education in developing countries. A review of six international CS education and ICT conferences during 2005-2006 hold little Africa related contextualized CS and higher level ICT education issues have been studied and reported. The study shows that there is a serious lack of research into contextualized CSE, and higher level ICT education in Africa. INNOVATIVE AND CHALLENGING PORT ENGINEERING PROGRAM Melany M. Ciampi and Claudio da Rocha Brito The so called PEP Program offers two graduate degrees: the Master of Science and the Doctor of Philosophy and it is a very dynamic and rich program, developed in modules, followed in several countries in the world. It follows the trend of global formation of professionals, mainly to attend the need of a prepared professional to perform in the port

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 152 Friday Sessions work market with a graduation level formation. In this new world scenario the skills, knowledge and training that are required are fundamental to survive in the changing labor market. It is imperative to be able to manage technological changes, be creative, take calculated risks, manage stress, think conceptually and recognize and respect people's diversity and individual differences.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 153 Friday Sessions

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 154 Saturday Sessions

Saturday Matrix

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 155 Saturday Sessions

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 156 Saturday Sessions Saturday Sessions Session S1A: Mini Workshop - A Workshop on Evaluation of Education Development Projects Chair: Russell L. Pimmel, National Science Foundation Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon A MINI WORKSHOP - A WORKSHOP ON EVALUATION OF EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS Ning Fang, Ann McKenna, Don L. Millard, Lance C. Pérez and Russell L. Pimmel Engineering educators are becoming more and more involved in both funded and unfunded projects to improve the learning of their students. The goal of this workshop is to prepare engineering faculty members to work with an evaluator to plan and implement an effective evaluation of an educational development project. In pursuit of this goal, the workshop intends to increase the participants' awareness of the purpose and uses of evaluation, of the role of goals and outcomes in the evaluation process, of the nature of the cognitive outcomes, and of evaluation tools for documenting and monitoring these types of outcomes. Session S1B: Mini Workshop - Electronic Inking Without the Tablet: Instructional Applications and Findings on Use of the Livescribe Smartpen Chair: Stephanie Moore, University of Virginia Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon B MINI WORKSHOP - ELECTRONIC INKING WITHOUT THE TABLET: INSTRUCTIONAL APPLICATIONS AND FINDINGS ON USE OF THE LIVESCRIBE SMARTPEN Stephanie Moore, Andy Van Schaack and James Groves In Fall 2008, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at the University of Virginia (UVa) began an efficacy study with Livescribe, Inc. on their smartpen technology. In particular, SEAS wanted to investigate whether the device could serve as a technological support for distributed learning as well as a more cost-effective alternative to other electronic inking solutions (e.g. tablet PCs or Wacom tablets). The smartpen technology works differently from other digital pens in that it records both the written word on the page and audio simultaneously, which can then be played back by tapping the handwritten marks on the page or saved as recordings that can be transferred to the computer as a viewable movie and played back. The pen also offers additional affordances that allow it to be adapted to educational settings. As part of the efficacy study, UVa has mapped out processes for using this technology for those additional affordances such as grading, creating interactive documents, electronic homework submission, and use of the device as an alternative to tablet PCs. In this special session, participants will have the chance to use the smartpen and learn more about the processes for using this technology for advanced application. Session S1C: Motivation linked to Instructional Decisions Chair: Adam Carberry, Tufts University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon C PROMOTING MOTIVATION AND PARTICIPATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A B-LEARNING EXPERIENCE Isabel Pereira and Antonio Dias Figueiredo A b-learning based pedagogical strategy is proposed to promote motivation and participation in higher education. It employs Open Space Technology (OST), collaborative activities, peer evaluation, individual reflection, and the sharing of a final purpose. OST lets the students group themselves according to their interest in a task and develops a mobilizing sense of belonging. A peer-evaluation phase is included, in which each group evaluates and gives suggestions to another group. The groups then produce the final versions of their work, which are presented at a final event whose format has been negotiated to strengthen motivation and shared commitment. The students are also expected to reflect individually on their own participation and learning during the course. The paper describes the pedagogical experiments that supported the development and validation of the strategy and explains why it had a positive impact on student participation and on the overall learning process. STUDENT LEARNING BEHAVIORS PROMOTED WITH INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY Catherine T. Amelink and Glenda R. Scales This study examines the use of collaborative instructional technology among engineering undergraduates at a Research I university and discusses the relationship of student use to desired educational outcomes. Specifically, trends in student use of the Tablet PC and related features over a four year period will be discussed. Frequency of

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 157 Saturday Sessions student use of the collaborative features within engineering courses and the subsequent relationship to gains in desired learning outcomes will be reviewed. Discussion focuses on how the results are being used to form initiatives to encourage student and faculty use. Administrators and faculty at other institutions that are involved in initiatives related to instructional technology or those interested in pedagogical approaches that use technology to encourage collaboration between peers as well as between instructors and students can use the results from this study to help inform projects at their own colleges and universities. ACHIEVEMENT GOAL THEORY: A FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTING GROUP WORK AND OPEN-ENDED PROBLEM SOLVING Casey Canfield and Yevgeniya V. Zastavker In educational psychology, achievement goal theory (AGT) has emerged as a useful framework for understanding student motivation and performance. This paper uses AGT to examine the effects of curriculum and pedagogy on student and instructor goal orientations in mathematics, physics, and engineering courses in a first-year engineering program. The following questions guide our analysis: (a) How do the existing curricula and pedagogies affect a performance goal orientation development? (b) In which ways do the existing curricula and pedagogies encourage a development of mastery goal orientation? The results of this qualitative study indicate: (1) contention between the instructors’ goals and students’ experiences of group work and open-ended learning experiences; (2) the negative impact of time pressure on successfully implementing mastery goal-oriented teaching strategies; (3) students’ maintenance of a performance goal orientation with high emphasis on grades rather than learning and engagement in work avoidance strategies to minimize work time, despite instructors’ efforts to encourage a mastery goal orientation; (4) dependence of student goal orientation on assessment mechanisms (grades) and perceived course “usefulness”. It is argued that AGT may help to frame positive changes in curricula and pedagogy to benefit overall student learning.

WORK IN PROGRESS - ASSESSMENT OF HOW ENGAGING IN TEACHING MAY ENHANCE THE LEARNING JOURNEY OF ENGINEERING AND EDUCATION STUDENTS Fouad Kamel, Margaret Baguley and David Thorpe This paper will examine the initial stages of a research project which seeks to evaluate the teaching potential of engineering and education students in the higher education setting. This analysis was conducted independently by three academics from engineering and education based on an initial neophyte teaching performance of an engineering student. The academics utilized both discipline-specific and pedagogical expertise in order to compare and contrast their findings and in the process were able to identify areas in which the student demonstrated lack of knowledge and/or skills during their teaching episode. The results of this pilot study provides important information in relation to enhancing the tertiary experience of students studying engineering, in areas such as including teaching and presentation skills which are increasingly becoming necessary for engineers; determining how to implement a range of these type of performance skills in a crowded engineering curriculum and devising ways to integrate pedagogical skills within authentic assessment tasks, such as through peer review of engineering students by pre-service education students which provides mutual benefits to both cohorts.

WORK IN PROGRESS - UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTS IN CONTRIBUTING TO STUDENT MOTIVATION Holly Matusovich, Michele Cooper and Katherine E Winters Answering calls to make engineering courses more engaging and interactive has increased instructional resource needs and contributed to the reliance on graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Little research has focused on how GTAs influence students’ motivation or in comparison to faculty influences on student motivation. In this study, we begin addressing this gap by using a mixed-methods approach to examine students’ perceptions of faculty vs. GTAs with regard to relationships with students, teaching practices, and classroom climates. Preliminary survey data analyses show statistically significant differences in perceptions of faculty and workshop leaders with regard to teaching practices. Data also show a belief that some men students treat women students differently in different teaching environments. Further analysis of the survey data and qualitative analysis of the interview data are needed to fully describe student perceptions of GTAs and faculty and associated relationships with self-efficacy, motivation for learning, and intentions to persist in engineering.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 158 Saturday Sessions Session S1D: From Classrooms to Platforms: The Comparisons within Distance Learning Environments Chair: Keith E. Hedges, Drury University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon D A SERVICE CONTEXT MODEL BASED ON ONTOLOGY FOR CONTENT ADAPTATION IN E-LEARNING Tong Ming-Wen, Liu Qing-Tang and Liu Xiao-Ning In heterogeneous service environment, E-learning, especially for learning content service, poses many opportunities and challengers of which the focus is that the service is even not able to be provided if the content can not be consumed in the service environment, termed service context also, which consists of the current state of networks, terminals, users, natural circumstance etc. To face the music, ISO/IEC proposes new standard, MPEG-21, in which content adaptation technology is employed to solve the problem of mismatch between content and service context. In content adaptation technology, service context model is a key point because it is the premise of other operations. Though service context modeling has been studied extensively recently and some models are created even standardized, there are some problems left still. One is that most of models are lack of ability of inference or the ability is weak because they are based on extensive makeup language (XML) or resource description framework (RDF). The other is that they are not capable of describing rules. However, it is necessary for service context model to reason and rule coding because those abilities will be helpful for datasize deceasing, context mining and subsequent processing ,e.g. adaptation decision-taking, In this paper, we propose a novel model in the basis of ontology, whose property is to reason and describe rules. By ontology modeling software, protégé, the model is performed. Based on the result of implementation, it is proven that the model is feasible.

IMPLEMENTATION OF A HYBRID MULTIMEDIA GENERAL EDUCATION COURSE IN ENGINEERING Patricia Backer Technology and Civilization is an advanced general education course (Area V: Culture, Civilization & Global Understanding) in the College of Engineering at San José State University that is designed to introduce students to the realm of history and usage of technology in society from an international perspective and to increase their awareness of both the uncertainties as well as the promises of the utilization of technology as a creative human enterprise. We offer two different versions of this course: a fully online course and a hybrid in-class lecture/self-paced course. Both versions of the course use multimedia learning materials on CD. The goal of these multimedia modules is to have the students use technology as they explore its impact on our society over time. This paper will describe the structure and content of this course and discuss how the course is taught in both the online version and the hybrid version. As hundreds of students have taken this course over the past five years, we have significant experience in providing online learning to students. In addition, we will discuss the assessment plan for this course and how we conduct continuous assessment to improve the content and delivery of this course.

AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO PLAN A COURSE FOR EHEA SUBJECTS: TRANSLATING DIDACTICAL GUIDES FOR A PLANNING MODEL Rafael Pastor Vargas, Roberto Hernández, Salvador Ros, Tim Read, Manuel Castro and Rocael Hernandez UNED (Spanish University for Distance Education) is the largest public distance education university in Spain with over 220,000 students, 1600 lecturers and 2000 administrative staff. Actually, the new degrees have been started using the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) directives. So, as it indicates in EHEA specifications, an online course must focus on personal mandatory activities as part of the evaluation model. In order to achieve the EHEA requirements, a didactic guide based on activity items (assessments, tasks, forums discussion, etc.) has been produced by lecturers in order to describe the overall work that students have to do in the course. To support that, an organization and planning system by blocks has been created where information (resources and activities) can be added by teachers from many sources and arranged flexibly. In the paper, a real scenario with two subjects of an official master's degree will be presented. These subjects meet the EHEA requirements. In this case, the way the didactic guide can be “translated” for the planning tool in a simple manner will be presented. Also satisfaction results that have been obtained from student surveys will be presented, in order to validate the use of this new tool and its impact on student learning. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTER-DISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION FOR A MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE IN A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COURSE Sonal Dekhane and Mai Yin Tsoi This paper addresses two main problems in two different domains by integrating them into one interdisciplinary project. Software engineering graduates lack the necessary skills and experience required by employers to address 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 159 Saturday Sessions real-world problems. Students enrolled in organic chemistry course often struggle with the content due to its visual nature and its requirement for several learning skills (visual, logical, mechanical). To address these two seemingly non-related educational issues, the investigators in this project have devised a “business” relationship between the students in an upper-level software engineering course and the students in an organic chemistry course. The software engineering students have been “hired” to design and develop a mobile application to help tutor and teach the organic chemistry concept of “functional groups” by involving multiple avenues of learning. By enabling this business relationship we attempt to provide the software engineering students with authentic experiences involved in developing software and to provide organic chemistry students with a tool that helps them learn fundamental concepts in organic chemistry. WORK IN PROGRESS - DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT OF AN ASYNCHRONOUS ON-LINE GRADUATE STATISTICS COURSE Larry G. Richards Since 1985, the University of Virginia has offered a graduate course Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists. A similar course has been offered at Virginia Commonwealth University. Both are essential components in Virginia’s Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Program – a distance learning initiative involving universities, industry and government partners. This course has two distinct audiences - full time students in-residence at UVA, and those who attend classes through CGEP while maintaining full-time jobs. In this paper, we review the results of the first offering of this course in an asynchronous on-line mode. All lectures were recorded in Camtasia and coordinated with PowerPoint slides (available as PDFs). Student reactions were assessed through surveys and anonymous feedback, as well as comments and e-mails. The level of acceptance of the on-line lectures was surprising. Most students reported high levels of satisfaction with the quality of the material, mode of delivery, flexibility and convenience. Session S1E: Computer Tools to Support Learning and Assessment in Multple Environments Chair: Edmund Tsang, Western Michigan University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon K ASSESSING INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO GROUPWORK BY A SUMMARY OF TRACKED COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITIES Nobel Khandaker and Leen-Kiat Soh Inaccurate or imprecise assessment of individual contributions by the teacher in a collaborative learning environment leaves the free-riding students and non-collaborating student groups undetected because of lack of accountability. This discourages student collaboration and student learning. To accurately evaluate students’ contributions and to provide timely interventions, a teacher could use a summary of the tracked collaborative activities of the participating students. We have developed and deployed an individual contribution as-sessment method for the students collaborating in Clas-sroomWiki – a Web-based collaborative writing envi-ronment. Our contribution assessment method combines the (1) tracked useful textual contributions, (2) idea- and concept-related contributions, and (3) other contributions like peer-rating to generate a summary that assesses the members’ individual contributions toward their groups. To test the impact of our contribution assessment method, we have used it to assess the contributions of the students participating in a collaborative writing assignment in two separate university-level courses using the ClassroomWiki environment. The results of our two-semester long deployment suggest that, using this summary, a teacher can (1) better evaluate the individual contribution of a student and (2) provide timely and proactive interventions to the non-contributing members and groups to improve collaboration and performance in the ClassroomWiki collaborative writing environment. RECOMMENDER: HELPING VIEWERS IN THEIR CHOICE FOR EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS IN DIGITAL TV CONTEXT Paulo Muniz de Avila, Elaine Cecilia Gatto and Sergio Donizetti Zorzo Currently in Brazil, a fundamental change is taking place in TV: the migration from analogue to digital TV system. This change has two main implications: an increase in transmission capacity for new channels with the same bandwidth and the ability to send applications with multiplexed audio-visual content. Brazilian government aims to exploit the transmission capacity for new channels offering programming created to distance learning and thereby promoting social inclusion in the vast majority of the population. This information overload demands mechanisms to help students to browse and select what education programs are best suited to their current level. Personalized recommendation systems emerge as a solution to this problem, providing the viewer with educational programs relevant to his profile. In this paper we present a personalized recommendation system, the Recommender consistent with the reference implementation of the Brazilian digital TV system. Finally, we present the results obtained after 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 160 Saturday Sessions using the proposed system. AN AUTOMATIC CORRECTION TOOL FOR INORGANIC CHEMICAL FORMULAS Ferran Prados, Jordi Poch, Isabel Villaescusa, Imma Boada and Josep Soler The kernel of an automatic correction tool developed to practice exercises of nomenclature and formulation of inorganic chemistry at the technical/engineering degrees at Girona Polytechnic University is presented. Such tool consists on two parts: nomenclature and formulation. This tool was developed inside a previous e-learning platform that has two modules specially designed for the generation and correction of technical exercises. The exercise generation module, used to automatically generate different versions of a base exercise and the correction module, used to automatically correct the generated exercises by applying a solution code maintained in the base problem. We exploit the key of both modules that is the definition of the base exercise which varies according to the parameters and the descriptors. On the other hand, the usability of the interface developed for writing inorganic chemical formulas was decisive for the success of the tool. Our environment was tested during the last three academic years at the introductory course in chemistry in our university. TECHNOLOGY NAVIGATOR: A TOOL FOR ZONING IN Peter Wiesner, William R. Tonti, Allan Tear, Phil Laplante, Dipak Patel, Randi Sumner and Hal Flescher Technology Navigator is an online tool, developed by IEEE volunteers, which enables students, faculty and professionals in engineering and the sciences to discover engineering content and events relevant to them, including conferences, publications, standards, and published articles. Tags and related tags, often based on a shared “market language,” are filtered across multiple disciplines and industry sectors. This provides “contextualized discovery” for users to chart their path through the overwhelming amount of resources available through IEEE Xplore. For experienced professionals and volunteers, the Technology Navigator tool is useful in discovering gaps and convergences in areas of interest, which were previously hidden in discipline silos. It also points out opportunities for collaboration in emerging and expanding areas. This paper examines the rationale for this tool and its usefulness to students and faculty in light of ABET 2000 engineering accreditation requirements. It also focuses on the challenges data population and maintenance by IEEE volunteers. WORK IN PROGRESS - BINX: A 3D XNA EDUCATIONAL GAME FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION Rasha Morsi, Chad Richards and Mona Rizvi This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an educational game for deployment on the Xbox 360 commercial game console. Video games can be extremely powerful and effective learning tools when deployed with methodical precision. Currently, no learning tools are available for commercial consoles that focus on teaching core concepts in Engineering. This work presents an overall design for an educational adventure game (BINX) to address Number Systems and their arithmetic operations in Digital Logic Design; a core course is Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. The paper also presents, in detail, the design and implementation of the first sublevel of the game. Session S1F: Courseware Technologies III Chair: Amalia Rusu, Fairfield University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon E & F MANIC CONTENT DELIVERY IN A MOBILE APPLICATION Eric Ssebanakitta, Paul E. Dickson and William Richards Adrion The University of Massachusetts Amherst RIPPLES group has developed and deployed classroom content creation/capture and delivery systems in the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware (MANIC) family for over a decade. The latest of these content delivery systems, iMANIC, is an application for the iPhone/iTouch. The iMANIC mobile platform makes the large variety of data in our complete catalog of courses, seminars, and lectures more accessible to the handheld device-wielding students of today. iMANIC flexibly delivers content from many different methods of content capture/creation, including content captured in fully instrumented classrooms, partially instrumented classroom, captured by handheld camcorders, and uploaded from earlier handcrafted multimedia and slide deck lecture presentations. The RIPPLES Group is transitioning content to the iMANIC iPhone/iTouch mobile application, and adapting the interface to the smaller screen size and other limitations of the device. We have plans to support other mobile devices in the future. Retrospective studies compared iMANIC with earlier MANIC delivery modes and evaluated iMANIC for automatically generating indexed presentations that include videos and simple PDF slide presentations.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 161 Saturday Sessions AGE AND TECHNOLOGY: ADULT LEARNING PERFORMANCE IN DESKTOP VIRTUAL REALITY ENVIRONMENTS Debra Steele, Sydney Fulbright and Argie N. Nichols, The research project was conducted by the University of Arkansas Fort Smith (UAFS) and the Occupational Education virtual reality research team at Oklahoma State University with the purpose of the learning effects of desktop virtual reality (VR) in college and technical training. Participants were from the UAFS two year surgical Technicians program and students from a career tech center. The paper presents findings from a five-year program of research on desktop virtual reality (VR) in college and technical education and describes what the research team has discovered to be important factors in its successful implementation. It defines desktop VR, outlines theoretical and empirical foundations for desktop VR research, summarizes important findings from research on desktop VR in technical education, and draws conclusions regarding implementation and further research in this field. CARDIAC PULSE DETECTION IN BCG SIGNALS IMPLEMENTED ON A REGULAR CLASSROOM CHAIR INTEGRATED TO AN EMOTIONAL AND LEARNING MODEL FOR PERSONALIZATION OF LEARNING RESOURCES Carlos Ramirez, Carlos Concha and Benjamin Valdes Emotions are related with learning processes, and physiological signals can be used to detect them. In this work, it is presented a model for the dynamic personalization of a learning environment. In the model, a specific combination of emotions and cognition processes are connected and integrated with the concept of ‘flow’, since it may provide a way to improve learning abilities. Physiological signals can be used to relate temporal emotions and subject’s learning processes; the cardiac pulse is a reliable signal that carries useful information about the subject’s emotional condition, which is detected using a classroom chair adapted with non invasive Electro-Mechanical Film (EMFi) sensors and an acquisition system that generates a ballistocardiogram (BCG), which is analyzed by a developed algorithm to obtain cardiac pulse statistics. A study including different data obtained from the chair’s sensors was carried out and interpreted in terms of emotions, which together with a cognitive model is used for the personalization of content in a learning scenario. Such model establishes a relation between the learner’s knowledge, the content of a course or a learning activity and the emotional condition of each student.

WORK IN PROGRESS - WEB-BASED SCREEN MOVIE PRESENTATIONS AS PART OF A PROFESSIONALISM COURSE IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING Jon Sticklen, Daina Briedis and Mark Urban-Lurain Over the last few years we have reported on a research program focusing on the use of online screen movies as a content delivery mechanism, and in particular, as a mechanism for use in high enrollment, lecture-laboratory courses. In the current report we begin a new thread in our research program: the use of online screen movies created by students as an exercise in building communication skills. In a junior level chemical engineering course on professionalism in the College of Engineering, Michigan State University, one of the course goals focuses on fulfilling ABET criteria for developing effective student oral communication skills. We augmented the traditional live presentation setting with student assignments to create a web-based presentation. Although preliminary, initial data suggests that the two types of presentations augment one another; students report skills learned in creating voice over screen presentations helped them be better traditional oral presenters, and vice versa.

WIIDORF: DECISION AND RECORDING FRAMEWORK FOR EDUCATIONAL LABS CENTERED ON THE NINTENDO WIIMOTE Simon Zhang, Mark Overholt, Juanita Gerard and Aaron Striegel The Nintendo Wiimote is a novel and popular user input device that has made human computer interaction intuitive, fun, and non-traditional. The Wiimote's immense popularity and low cost has sparked interest from all corners of the research community, specifically the education and psychology communities. Educators, for example, have used the Wiimote to engage students in the classroom, allowing them to learn and have fun at the same time. The Wiimote's innovative motion and position tracking controls have made this a popular tool in computer interactions. Aimed at facilitating this growing research interest, WiiDoRF was built to make capturing a user's game decisions from Wiimote interactions and writing games for that purpose simple and easy. WiiDoRF is 100% open source, highly modular, Java written, and customizable. Furthermore, WiiDoRF is scalable to potentially facilitate large scale, statistical data mining with its back end MySQL database. Experimental results were conducted with WiiDoRF to show the viability of decision recording games written in WiiDoRF.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 162 Saturday Sessions Session S1G: Effectiveness of Learning Assessment Tools and Models Chair: Wookwon Lee, Gannon University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon G WORK IN PROGRESS - E-TAT: ONLINE TOOL FOR TEAMWORK AND "SOFT SKILLS" ASSESSMENT IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING EDUCATION Dragutin Petkovic, G. Thompson, R. Todtenhoefer, S. Huang, B. Levine, S. Parab, G. Singh, R. Soni and S. Shrestha Assessment of teamwork and "soft skills" in the context of software engineering has been recognized as very challenging. Furthermore, there are very few software tools that allow efficient applications of these assessments. San Francisco State University, working jointly with University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany, and Florida Atlantic University, has developed a novel set of composite metrics for teamwork and soft skills assessment, which have been applied manually and with low efficiency in our jointly run SE classes. In order to apply this composite assessment method more efficiently and effectively, we have embarked upon the design of an Open Source Web-based electronic Teamwork Assessment Tool, e-TAT. In this paper we present the goals, design objectives and the status of the design and development of e-TAT. WORK IN PROGRESS - AN INVESTIGATION OF VARIED GAME-BASED LEARNING SYSTEMS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Wei-Fan Chen This study developed and evaluated two varied game-based learning systems in a software engineering course. The first system adopted a role-playing gaming strategy for students to learn about the process of software development effort estimation in a team-based environment. The second system used a traditional drill-and-practice gaming strategy to guide design. An experimental study involving human subjects was conducted to compare the effects of both systems on students’ learning performance and attitude. Univariate analyses revealed that the game-based learning had a significant main effect on dependent variables in the knowledge test (F=5.166, p<.05), but not in the intention and satisfaction measures (p>.05). The results showed that students in the drill-and-practice gaming group achieved significantly higher scores in the knowledge test (M=72.86) than the role-playing gaming group (M=61.90). The measures of students’ intention and satisfaction were in the range of a moderate to high level. However, no significant differences were found between the two groups in terms of their affective measures.

ASSESSING STUDENTS' INTEGRATIVE LEARNING IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF STRUCTURE, BEHAVIOR, AND FUNCTION Yuen-Yan Chan, Alfred C. H. Yu and Carol K. K. Chan Learning in biomedical engineering is highly interdisciplinary: students need to integrate concepts between engineering and life sciences, and be able to design and develop technologies with physiological considerations. In this study, biomedical engineering students’ artifacts were analyzed in detail according to the structure-behavior-framework (SBF) framework. The SBF framework has been investigated by educational researchers and learning scientists; in particular, the behavioral and functional dimensions were proved to be related to a sophisticated level of understanding of complex systems. Existing research results also indicate that experts (or expert-like learners) show a deeper understanding of the behavioral and functional aspects of systems. In the current study, a 5-level scale comprising structural, behavioral, and functional dimensions of integrated learning was constructed to assess student learning in a biomedical engineering project course. Our results indicate that high achievers and low achievers were different in the behavioral and functional dimensions. The results also indicate significant relationships between behavioral and functional dimensions of learning and students’ final course performance. These findings align with existing results in cognitive science and learning sciences on expert-novice differences, which help connecting engineering educational inquiries to the rich body of literature and findings in human learning. WORK IN PROGRESS - A MODıFıED TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL FOR E-ASSESSMENT: INTENTıONS OF ENGıNEERıNG STUDENTS TO USE WEB-BASED ASSESMENT TOOLS Nurcan Alkis and Sevgi Ozkan With the usage of information technologies in education field, e-assessment that uses information technology to assess students learning started to become popular. Web-based testing, a type of e-assessment, seems to have advantages when compared to traditional testing, like costing, reliability, ease of use etc. Although it seems to have advantages, students’ intentions to use web-based assessment tools are needed to be researched to identify the factors that affect students’ acceptance of such technologies as well as to enhance these tools by taking into account the 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 163 Saturday Sessions needs of users. This paper presents the work in progress in order to determine the factors that affect engineering students’ intentions to use web-based assessment systems. The study takes Technology Acceptance Model as a base for research model and by adding new external factors that affect users’ intention towards to use web-based assessment which will help the improvement of web-based assessment tools by considering users needs. WORK IN PROGRESS - HOW FORMATIVE FEEDBACK ENHANCES THE STUDENT LEARNING EXPERIENCE Su White and Alastair Irons Faculty invest considerable effort to provide students with formative feedback. Educational research has endorsed the value of a clearly articulated approach when providing student feedback known as ‘assessment for learning’. In order to ascertain whether claims associated with ‘assessment for learning’ hold true in the engineering disciplines, a three-year study of the deployment of such approaches was undertaken. Preliminary research identified differences in perceptions between staff and students. They showed different understandings of what constitutes feedback, and different expectations of how feedback might be used. Session S1H: Retention Across-the-Board Chair: Heather Watson, James Madison University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon H WORK IN PROGRESS - A PRACTICAL MODEL FOR ACHIEVING GENDER PARITY IN UNDERGRADUATE COMPUTING: CHANGE THE SYSTEM, NOT THE STUDENT Lecia J. Barker, J. McGrath Cohoon and Leisa D. Thompson This paper presents a systemic change model of undergraduate computing for accomplishing gender parity. Rather than view women as needing to be modified or repaired to fit the system, this model advocates changing the system to fit the needs of a wider range of students. Changing the system is a more sustainable approach to creating gender parity than providing extra support to students with less experience or background or students who are less likely to feel that people like themselves belong in computing. The systemic change model is founded in research specific to computing education, research on undergraduate retention in general, research on conceptions and misconceptions of computing careers, and research, theory, and practices of communication. The parts of the model and examples of practices that can change the system in ways consistent with research are presented.

WORK IN PROGRESS - TRACKING THE SUCCESS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN UNDERGRADUATES MAJORING IN ENGINEERING Sharron A. Frillman, Catherine E. Brawner and Cindy Waters Relatively few studies have focused specifically upon racial and/or ethnic minority cohorts who choose to matriculate within engineering. This research will consider one such underrepresented group, African American women, who are making successful progress toward undergraduate degrees in any of the engineering disciplines. This work in progress examines the following questions: 1) What are the women’s reasons for selecting engineering? 2) Having chosen to remain in engineering, what strategies are assisting them in their efforts to succeed and excel? And 3) What are the issues that are of special concern to them as African American women who have chosen a field of study that has traditionally been viewed as overwhelmingly White and male? WORK IN PROGRESS - FACTORS AFFECTING THE SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF AN INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING PROGRAM BY STUDENTS FROM RURAL COMMUNITIES Cliff Fitzmorris, Deborah Trytten and Randa Shehab Although many programs that seek to increase the diversity of engineering have chosen to focus on sex and race/ethnicity, U.S. engineering students tend to be homogeneous in other dimensions too. We are currently examining differences in experiences for successful students coming from rural backgrounds. To answer this question we have re-analyzed a set of interviews from industrial engineering students at a single large Midwestern public university that has significant populations of rural, suburban, and urban students. Students were aggregated into subgroups based on the size of the student’s high school community. This qualitative study explores the experiences of five rural engineering students. We have found that the academic success of these five students is affected by their academic preparation, interaction with faculty, and interaction with their peers. Interestingly, these five students were most affected by experiences that either increased or diminished their relationship with faculty or their peers.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 164 Saturday Sessions THE MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES OF SENSE-MAKERS: REFRAMING ENGINEERING STUDENT RETENTION Brian A. Danielak, Ayush Gupta and Andrew Elby This paper empirically argues for a closer examination of what we wish to retain when we speak of "retention" in engineering [1]. We present and interpret data from clinical interviews and classroom video of "Michael," a student who feels marginalized by an engineering program that undervalues him because of his stance toward knowledge [2],[3]. Michael is a sophomore Electrical Engineering and Mathematics major in a Basic Circuits course. In his own words, he’s a “fringe” student because of his robust tendency toward making sense of the concepts being taught rather than memorizing formulae. He also feels alienated because he views learning in terms of argument and intuition, instead of algorithm and rote acceptance. Furthermore, for Michael the practice of sense-making defines him; it’s an integral aspect of his identity [4]. Thus, Michael’s self-reported sense of alienation resonates strongly with existing identity-based accounts of students leaving the field [5],[6]. We contend the field of engineering suffers if individuals like Michael don’t pursue it. Through this case study of Michael, we urge the retention discussion to consider not just the demographic categories of people we hope to keep but also the approaches to knowledge, learning, and problem-solving we aim to support. WORK IN PROGRESS - SOCIAL BARRIERS AND SUPPORTS TO UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITIES' SUCCESS IN STEM FIELDS Terrell L. Strayhorn The present study builds upon previous research by exploring social barriers that limit URMs’ success—not just Black and Latino men—as well as social supports that enable the success of those who succeed academically in STEM fields. For the purposes of this study, “success” is defined as (a) persisting in college as a STEM major and (b) maintaining a 3.0 cumulative grade point average (GPA). The primary methods of data collection were semi-structured one-on-one and group interviews with 38 URMs majoring in STEM. Three major themes were identified as barriers: (a) Negative perceptions/stereotypes of people of color (b) Lack of same-race peers in classes/labs and (c) Negative interactions in the classroom. Two themes were identified as supports: (a) URM faculty who served as mentors/conduits and (b) sociocultural and spiritual resources. Findings hold significant promise for future practice, policy, and research. Session S1J: Global Issues in Engineering IV Chair: Claudio da Rocha Brito, COPEC-Council of Researches in Education Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 8:00 am - 9:30 am Salon J IMPROVING SME ICT UTILIZATION THROUGH INDUSTRIAL ATTACHMENT PROGRAM: INDONESIA CASE Paulus Insap Santosa and Sri Suning Kusumawardani This paper reports the deployment of a group of students to several SME in an Industrial Attachment Program (IAP). The students were all engineering students who have previously attended courses conducted by Cisco Networking Academy and have passed certain computer networking certifications. The participating SME were those who are doing business in furniture and garment in the area of Jawa Tengah and Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The primary goal of the IAP is to bridge the gap between students’ technical ICT ability and SME’ specific ICT needs. Through the IAP program, students got the opportunity to build the capacity through real time projects that integrate practical “IT essentials” skills into SME. The main students’ activities were categorized into three areas, namely operational, business and technology, and strategic. These aspects were tailored according to the individual SME’s needs. Each student had to prepare a work plan he/she started working at the assigned SME respectively. Before the end of the internship, each student had to produce a road map that shows the development of SME ICT utilization for 2 years to come. The complete road map was eligible to be submitted for a competition that the winner would be presented with a special prize. ON DEPLOYMENT OF EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES IN THE ARAB GULF STATES: STUDENTS' ENGAGEMENT THROUGH COOPERATIVE LEARNING Waddah Akili The paper is a follow up to previous work by the author on viable strategies to improve the classroom environment of engineering colleges in the Arab Gulf States (the Region). At the start, the paper provides an overview of relevant benchmarks of engineering education in the Region. Then, relates author’s preliminary findings on teaching/learning practices in engineering colleges of the Arab Gulf States, sheds light on the pros and cons of the lecture format, and examines the literature on meanings and substance of cooperative engagement strategies. Next, it identifies common barriers to reformation, in general, and to the use of modern pedagogical skills in particular. The paper also argues 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 165 Saturday Sessions that any change in Region’s classroom practices (dominated by traditional lecture-based methods) must be mandated by the administration. What is necessary to create a change, is for the department or college, to have a comprehensive and integrated set of components: articulated expectations, opportunities for faculty to learn about new pedagogies, and an equitable reward system. STRATEGIES TO INFUSE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES AND INDUSTRIAL COLLABORATION IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION Hudson Jackson, Kassim Tarhini, Alina Zapalska and Sharon Zelmanowitz The influence of a global economy and the speed of communications will require future engineers to have a diverse background and develop sensitivity to the needs of other cultures. Engineers must be able to function in this increasingly global market with adequate awareness of engineering needs and practices across cultures. Undergraduate engineering education must be structured to provide adequate balance between theory and practice, as well as industrial relevance and global perspectives in engineering. Current approaches to address this issue include the introduction of technical advisory boards, co-op experience, capstone projects, international exchange programs, and encouraging students to take non-technical courses in humanities, business and management. Creating partnerships with industry and other institutions is another key step that academic institutions have taken to expose students to engineering practice in a global context. Partnerships should be long-term and established at the local and global levels with input from practicing professional engineers. There are other approaches that could be used to generate interest and help develop activities that enable students to acquire the skills needed for global engineering practice. The authors suggest strategies that can be adopted by academic institutions to prepare engineers capable of addressing future global challenges.

LEARNING ENGINEERING TO TEACH MATHEMATICS Josep Ferrer, Marta Peña and Carmen Ortiz The Bologna process is a good opportunity to bring together first-year mathematics courses of engineering degrees and technology courses offered in subsequent years. In fact, the Faculty Council has decided that 20% of the credits from basic courses must be related to technological applications. To this end, during the past academic year a mathematical engineering seminar was held with each session dealing with one technological discipline. The main goal of the seminar, which relied on the presence of speakers from both mathematics and engineering departments, was to identify the most commonly used mathematical tools. Furthermore, a set of exercises and some guidelines addressed to faculty lacking an engineering background were created. Here, we present some of this material: first, a summary of the collection of exercises illustrating the use of Linear Algebra in different engineering areas such as Mechanical Engineering, Control and Automation, and second, some exercises and the guideline for Electrical Engineering.

REFLECTIONS OF NINE YEARS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY CAPSTONE COURSES Maria Feldgen and Osvaldo Clua The purpose of this paper is to analyze the students’ experiences in our Computer Science capstone course at the University of Buenos Aires during the last nine years. Students developed applications and prototypes for the School researchers that the School’s overburdened computing services group could not undertake. The benefits and challenges in collaborating with the School of Engineering’s community provided an opportunity for the students to undertake meaningful responsibility and to see the effect of their own actions on others. All activities that instructors and students undertook to get information of both quantitative and qualitative data were used diagnostically to alter teaching and learning to meet student needs. A phenomenographic qualitative approach was chosen to evaluate our clients’ concern about students’ motivation and expectations. We found that almost all of the study participants perceived that contributing to a better service of campus labs positively enhanced their motivation toward the project. The key ingredient of highly motivated teams was the empathy towards the client’s lab researchers and they software problems. These teams committed significant time for the project, more than we asked for, and finished earlier than others.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 166 Saturday Sessions Session S2A: Mini Workshop - Introducing the Manufacturing and Engineering Technologies Education Clearinghouse (METEC) Chair: Pomeranz Gilah, Sinclair Community College Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon A MINI WORKSHOP - INTRODUCING THE MANUFACTURING AND ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIES EDUCATION CLEARINGHOUSE (METEC) Pomeranz Gilah and Steven Wendel By attending this session, engineering technology educators will become aware of, understand the benefits of, and be able to use the Manufacturing and Engineering Technologies Education Clearinghouse (METEC) at www.meteconline.org, a National Science Foundation funded electronic resource center of peer reviewed exemplary materials for classroom use and pedagogical improvement. While METEC serves technology educators at all levels, this session may be of particular use to new educators trying to avoid reinventing the wheel. Another goal of this session is to strengthen the collaboration between the National Center for Manufacturing Education (NCME—the host of METEC) and IEEE Session S2B: Special Session - Using Qualitative Data to Bring Positive Culture into Engineering Programs Chair: Randa L. Shehab, University of Oklahoma Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - USING QUALITATIVE DATA TO BRING POSITIVE CULTURE INTO ENGINEERING PROGRAMS Susan E Walden, Randa L. Shehab, Deborah A Trytten, Cindy E Foor and Teri J Murphy The Research Institute for STEM Education (RISE) examines success in engineering from the perspective of achieving equity of outcome. Equity ensures that opportunities and formal and informal knowledge are available to all students for participation and success in engineering education. Using a qualitative research design that employs semi-structured student interviews as the primary source of data, our findings emphasize the importance of a positive academic culture on the recruitment and retention of engineering students, especially students from historically under-represented groups. The purpose of this session is to engage participants in qualitative data analysis as they review interview narratives and identify evidence in support of RISE research recommendations on positive culture. Participants will use their analysis to develop implementation plans that transfer the recommendations to their institutional contexts. Session S2C: The Learners, Instructors, and Tools of Distance Learning Chair: Keith E. Hedges, Drury University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - SUPPORT FOR MOBILE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING APPLICATIONS Sergio Martin, Ivica Boticki, George Jacobs, Manuel Castro and Juan Peire This work is intended to describe a framework aimed to address the challenges in the development of mobile Collaborative Learning applications. Firstly, the paper offers an overview of some of the main principles of Collaborative Learning that will be the basis of the framework, which is based on three main pillars: collaboration and communication among students; context-awareness (gathering users’ data, such as geo-location, movements, academic information, and history) to provide personalize information and services; and interoperability with e-learning as many organizations use them. Evaluation will be conducted with a group of students of a “Professional Expert Course on Mobile Programming” that will use the framework to build their applications. THE DETAILS MAKE A DIFFERENCE WHEN DELIVERING TECHNOLOGY COURSES VIA WEB-BASED DISTANT EDUCATION Argie N. Nichols, Debra Steele and Earlene Washburn The delivery of online courses on the University of Arkansas Fort Smith (UAFS) campus has been taking place for ten plus years, in which few studies have been conducted. This paper details ongoing research of three professors from UAFS. According to the information reviewed, online teaching is just as effective as traditional classroom teaching. With smartly designed courses and appropriate online teaching andragogies, online university courses can be more effective than classroom instruction. Our research even suggest that some types of technology course content might be particularly more effective if offered only online. This paper will outline four main details involved in

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 167 Saturday Sessions making a successful online course: (1) students must have writing skills, be self-motivated, and self-disciplined, (2) faculty member needs to have training, use appropriate andragogies, and have a simple course design, (3) when instructor involvement increases, courses yield more positive outcomes, and (4) online courses which include face-to-face, telecommunication components or blended classes with occasional face-to-face meetings are more effective than full online courses. LEARNING EVALUATION IN CLASSROOM MEDIATED BY TECHNOLOGY MODEL USING FUZZY LOGIC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMAZONAS STATE William R. Malvezzi, Andreza B. Mourão and Graça Bressan This article presents a tool developed to follow up and to evaluate the student learning using Fuzzy model. This tool enable the coordination of Classroom mediated by technology (CMT) courses at University of State of Amazonas to elect the best teaching practices that allow the increasing of student’s performance. The course coordinators will have a tool to support decision-making, assisting professors in the use of new methods. The learning environment is modeled using Fuzzy theory, based on parameters and rules selected by courses coordinators, teachers and pedagogical experts. Analysis of the environment to be modeled and of its requirements shows the parameters to be selected. In the CMT system the teacher has no direct contact with the student in the classroom, to ask direct questions, or even to look facial expressions to detect immediately the doubts of the student. For this reason, the system must monitor the students behavior as they perform different activities, that will be tracked by the system and used in the fuzzy modeling to evaluate individual performance as well as whole learning process. The paper presents the selected parameters, developed rules and the results of the fuzzy model for the evaluation in a real situation. IDENTIFYING SUCCESS FACTORS FOR WBLMS USE BY INSTRUCTORS OF ENGINEERING DEPARTMENTS Duygu Findik and Sevgi Ozkan Implementation of web-based learning management systems as a supportive tool in higher education has become so popular with the rapid expansion of information technologies. However, users’ acceptance is the primary issue to be considered for the successful implementation and management processes of the systems. In this context, this study aims to understand behavioral intentions of engineering instructors towards web-based learning management systems and further to identify the influencing factors based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Acceptance Model, Innovation Diffusion Theory, and Social Cognitive Theory. A comprehensive survey was conducted with 123 engineering instructors and evaluated using structural equation modeling to verify the proposed theoretical model. As a result, the relationships between the factors are detected to explain and predict the adoption of engineering academicians towards web-based learning management system through discussing the implication of this study and future research directions.

WIKI: A PROPOSAL FOR COLLABORATIVE WORK Daniel Capelo Borges, Herminio Borges Neto, Janete Barroso Batista and Regina Santos Young The objective of this article is to analyze the use of the WIKI model in a distance education program for education students taking a fourth semester course in distance education at the Federal University of Ceará in the second semester of 2009 (August though December). Involved in this study were nineteen students and five teachers who used the MOODLE system (Course Management System). Other tools outside WIKI were used to develop academic activities such as: group discussions; debates and developing writing skills: email, chat, electronic board, forums, etc. By observing the use of these tools (mainly WIKI) we concluded that it is very difficult to obtain learning objectives through models that demand collaboration and participation among students. Based on this research our study group surmised that inherited educational methods based on individual merits inhibit collaboration and dialog in learning processes both face-to-face and distance learning. Session S2D: Improvements in Software Engineering Education Chair: Rajendra K. Raj, Rochester Institute of Technology Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon D WORK IN PROGRESS - AN OPPORTUNISTIC APPROACH FOR LEARNING WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Yonglei Tao and Chris Plouff Opportunistic software development is not only a common practice, but also of great educational value. In this paper, we describe our experience with guiding students in an opportunistic approach to learning web programming. Our observations indicate that it is an effective approach for introducing topics that cross the boundaries of different technologies.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 168 Saturday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - PROJECT PRACTICES OF AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Kazuhiro Matsuo and Shota Anzawa As information system becomes core infrastructure of our society, the size and complexity of software products increase rapidly. So dependable and efficient software development methods are demanded and new methods such as an agile method are introduced. It is, however, not easy to teach and excise processes of software development. Most of undergraduate students in computer and software engineering courses are busy for mastering basic programming skills and for understanding computer and DB systems. There is almost no room for learning skills for software development in Japan. There are, however, always some percentages of students who can easily master basic skills and knowledge and are ready to learn more. So we decided to start a project practices as an extracurricular activity. The project is aimed for students to learn an agile method and actual experiences of group development processes. In this presentation we report our work in progress of extracurricular activities for project practices of agile software development to highly-motivated undergraduate students. LEARNING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING BASIC CONCEPTS USING A FIVE-PHASE GAME Adrian Rusu, Robert Russell, John Robinson and Amalia Rusu Unfortunately, the stereotype of a software engineer or computer scientist is one who spends his whole day in a cubicle programming. Other aspects of software engineering, such as holding meetings with the customer and users to gather requirements, documenting requirements, design, and testing are not talked about. Many middle and high school students believe this stereotype and become disinterested in a prospective career in software engineering. As a result, we developed a game prototype to teach software engineering basic concepts to middle and high school students. Our game allows a student to explore the various phases of the software life cycle, which are requirements, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. The waterfall software life cycle was practiced while developing this game, and every student in the Information Visualization course participated equally in the development of the game. In addition, visualization techniques were used to develop this game.

TEACHING WEB SERVICES AND SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE USING MOBILE PLATFORMS Mark S. Sherriff Even as everyday software increasingly transitions to online software services, many educational projects in software development courses still remain on single-user PC systems. To better prepare our students for this emerging trend in software development, material on web services and service-oriented architecture should become more of a focus in computer science courses. This paper describes our experiences in teaching a senior-level course at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2009 geared around the concepts of web services and service-oriented architecture using the Windows Mobile platform. In this course, students worked in teams to produce web services that could be utilized by other teams to eventually build a campus tour application for the Windows Mobile device. We believe that using mobile devices is an optimal vehicle for teaching service-oriented architecture due to their relatively limited processing power, portability, pervasiveness in society, and interest among students.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF A TOOL-BASED APPROACH FOR TEACHING FORMAL SPECIFICATIONS Salamah Salamah, Omar Ochoa and Ann Q. Gates The use of formal methods in software engineering has been shown to be an effective way to improving the dependability of developed systems. The difficulty of writing, reading, and understanding formal specifications, which is an essential component of formal verification, remains one of the main obstacles in the adoption of formal methods in industry. It is, thus, essential that undergraduate students in computing programs learn how to specify formal system properties. This paper outlines an instructive component that uses a tool to support the teaching of formal approaches and languages, and it presents educational outcomes from using such a component in undergraduate courses. The component uses a model checking-based tool LTLV to teach Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), a well-known specification language. In addition, this paper describes two experiments that compare the effectiveness of the new approach to that of the traditional lecture-based approach. The results of the experiments show promise that the tool-based approach can be effective in teaching formal specifications. The paper provides analysis of the results of the studies, as well as lessons learned from the experiments.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 169 Saturday Sessions Session S2E: K-12 Initiatives Chair: Jennifer Kadlowec, Rowan University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon K USING MATERIALS SCIENCE FOR COMMUNITY OUTREACH, ENGINEERING EDUCATION, AND INNOVATION Amy Hsiao and Jonathon Dunphy Innovation has its fundamental roots in engineering and entrepreneurship. This paper presents primary research gathered from high school science teachers from selected K-12 schools across Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, addressing specifically the gaps that they have identified as being most challenging in defining what engineering is in the realm of 9-12th grade science curriculum. The research results are incorporated into the development of a hands-on learning tool, a “portable materials science lab kit” that considers the input from these community educators and uses various types of materials, i.e. composites, nanomaterials, magnetic alloys, to demonstrate what engineering is and how engineering and innovation are relevantly applied to the important sectors of the province (the energy, oil and gas, oceans, and wildlife sectors). The “portable lab kits” are designed for high school classrooms, in which small groups of students work through hands-on laboratory modules focused on a specific material in a specific application. The process of innovation is thus shown from the perspective of using materials science to illustrate “scientific concept”, to “design” (invention), to “entrepreneurship” (commercialization), to "technological application". A SNAPSHOT OF YOUNG AMERICA'S PERSPECTIVE TOWARDS STEM Javier F. Pulecio, Alexandra Pulecio, Michaela Westlake and Sanjukta Bhanja The purpose of this study is to examine third and eighth grade students’ attitudes and knowledge of STEM related careers in an American school culture. For the past several years, we in the Nano Computer Research Group at the University of South Florida, have presented local K-12 institutions with various aspects of our research to raise STEM awareness. This past year we augmented our knowledge module based on past experiences and formalized it to engage 67 students from 4 distinct 3rd and 8th grade classes.

WORK IN PROGRESS - INITIAL ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A NATIONWIDE HIGH SCHOOL EXTRACURRICULAR ENGINEERING PROGRAM: JETS TEAMS COMPETITION Kenneth J. Reid and Megan Balkovic The Junior Engineering Technology Society (JETS) offers students the opportunity to explore, assess and experience engineering through the TEAMS competition; a nationwide theme-based competition which presents engineering through the practical applications of math and science alongside everyday world challenges. More than 10,000 high school students participate annually. Nationwide, this and similar large-scale efforts to attract high school students to the innovative, creative and inventive nature of engineering draw thousands of students annually. Many of these efforts fail to assess their success. While the events are popular, do they draw students to engineering? The 2009 TEAMS competitions were assessed with questionnaires prior to, at the conclusion of and far after the event. Findings presented include student assessment of the TEAMS activity itself and perceived ability to succeed in engineering, confidence in succeeding in engineering and ability to contribute to an engineering team. Questions posed to coaches (teachers), include their reason for participation and their perception of the impact on students. Finally, plans for further assessment are presented. Assessment of this large, nationwide K-12 competition is intended to begin a discussion on the definition of ‘success’ for such programs. EXCELSIOR SCHOLARS SUMMER PROGRAM: INTRODUCING K-12 STUDENTS TO MICROELECTRONIC AND NANOFABRICATION THROUGH PHOTOVOLTAICS Michael A. Jackson, Elaine Lewis, Stephanie Townsend, Sara Silverstone and Santosh Kurinec A two week summer camp for 7th-8th grade students introducing the attendees to modern integrated circuit manufacturing through basic solar cell fabrication has been developed and delivered. The program was funded by New York State Department of Education and challenged the grantee to develop a camp that would engage these middle school students in science activities at a level commensurate with high school graduation learning outcomes. An independent evaluator performed a rigorous evaluation using multiple methods, to triangulate the findings. The results showed the program was implemented with fidelity to the grant proposal and that high quality instructional strategies were used. Students exhibited a statistically significant increase in positive attitudes toward science and in self-efficacy for doing science. Details on camp agenda, hands-on activities, staffing, logistics, student recruitment, and budget are discussed for those considering similar activities.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 170 Saturday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPING ELEMENTARY SCIENCE TEACHER TRAINING MODULES BASED ON DOCTORAL RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING Diana Prieto, Patricio Rocha, Wilkistar Otieno and Tapas K. Das With the objective of addressing the need for reinforcing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in the education system, authorities have encouraged the creation of partnerships between universities, school districts, and other entities to attract and develop science teachers. STARS, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded GK-12 program, and The School District of Hillsborough County (Florida) is an example of such partnership, which consists of the joint preparation of bi-monthly teacher training workshops. In this paper, we describe the experience and analyze the results of the STARS engineering graduate fellows developing original and innovative research-driven lesson modules for K-5 teachers in the workshops. Session S2F: Enhancements to Engineering Curriculum through Course Implementation Chair: Dave M. Johnson, San Diego Troops to Engineers Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon E & F EVALUATING VARIATIONS ON A STUDENT MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGY James R. Rowland A motivational system that rewards students partly based on the higher of their scores on frequent short quizzes or on block exams has been in place for the past four years in the EE service courses at the University of Kansas. These courses are offered to majors in mechanical and aerospace engineering in spring semesters and to majors in civil, architectural, and petroleum engineering in fall semesters. Papers presented by the author at recent FIE Conferences have described this successful motivational strategy but only for two EE service courses offered once each during the academic year. The motivational model was extended in the 2009-2010 academic year with interesting results to courses for majors in electrical and computer engineering. In this paper, six different courses (sophomores to seniors) are examined to demonstrate the effects of varying parameters in the model. In addition to the levels of students, variations are examined for widely different class sizes, class times of the day, fixed or variable percentages for the higher score components, numbers and lengths of blocks per term, fixed or unannounced schedules for short quizzes, policies on excused absences from the short quizzes, and exemptions for the final exam. Comparisons for these six courses reveal a remarkably consistent and simple motivational format that can be applied to undergraduate classes: (1) Explain the system so that its advantages are clear to each student, (2) Keep it simple to avoid confusion, and (3) Meet student expectations for those taught by the same professor in previous courses. INTEGRATIVE LEARNING IN A SYNTHESIS AND DESIGN STUDIO: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY Joachim Walther, Nadia Kellam, Tracie Costantino and Bonnie Cramond Engineering education is uniquely qualified to make strides towards both a more integrated curriculum and understanding the benefits of an integrated learning experiences, due to the vast amounts of experience with innovative integrative curricular structures. This paper briefly describes an innovative approach to integrate student learning through a four year Synthesis and Design Studio. This provides the context for a phenomenological research study that investigated the nature of students’ integrative learning processes. More specifically, the study examined integrative learning through the lens of students’ experiences of the focus on deliberate reflection and engagement in the authentic interdisciplinary setting during an interdisciplinary Studio offered in the Fall of 2009. This study consisted of the interpretive analysis of individual reflection reports written by each student after participating in a range of reflective activities over the course of the semester. In addition, the qualitative data included open-ended responses collected from a mid and end-of-semester survey that was conducted externally. The phenomenological analysis of the students’ experiences suggests that their development of a professional way of being as a key aspect of integrative learning that emerged gradually from the complex influences of the interdisciplinary educational experience and can be fostered by deliberate, continuous reflection. LEARNING AND PRACTICING FUNDAMENTALS OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING THROUGH BUILDING AND PROGRAMMING A MICROCONTROLLER WITH MULTIPLE PERIPHERALS Jianjian Song, Xiaoyan Mu, Huihui Xu and Mark Yoder A required sophomore course on microcontrollers and computer architecture was designed and offered for the first time in 2009 to expose our electrical engineering (EE) sophomore students to microcontroller-based applications so that they could appreciate and be exposed to fundamentals of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) through hardware and software design and interfacing. The course also helps students to obtain a broad view of various subjects of ECE from circuits, signals, digital logic, microcontrollers, C and assembly language programming to system design, implementation and measurement so that they can make a well informed decision on whether to 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 171 Saturday Sessions continue to major in EE. The course builds a foundation for future classes that may require instrumentation or microcontroller-based applications such as those on communications, control, power electronics as well as junior and senior design courses. In addition, the students are required to purchase most of the hardware components for the course so that they can use the components for future projects. EXPANDING THE INTRODUCTION OF MICROFLUIDICS THROUGH A PROBLEM-BASED LABORATORY COURSE TO MULTIPLE ENGINEERING DISCIPLINES AT FIVE UNIVERSITIES Catherine Maltbie, Ian Papautsky, Suzanne van den Hoogenhof, David Eddington, Bruce Gale, Jin-Woo Choi and Glenn Walker Microfluidics is a multidisciplinary field that deals with the behavior and precise control of microliter and nanoliter volumes of fluids. While microfluidics has transformed many areas of engineering and applied sciences, minimal effort has been directed at transferring microfluidics research to the undergraduate curricula. Addressing this need, the University of Cincinnati has developed an undergraduate laboratory course to introduce students to microfluidics device development that is currently being expanded to four other universities with the assistance of an NSF CCLI Phase II grant (DUE-0814911). This course has been taught at University of Cincinnati four times, the University of Illinois at Chicago three times previously and the University of Utah, Louisiana State University, and North Carolina State University once. This paper will discuss course evaluation and the issues encountered in offering the course at five diverse educational institutions. Some of the issues included course structure (quarters vs. semesters), student background knowledge (engineering majors), and domain expertise level (graduate or undergraduate). The initial success of the pilot program and expansion to other universities is encouraging as course materials are adapted and more engineering students are introduced to advanced multidisciplinary research topics using microfluidics.

SDIM AN INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMMING COURSE WITH AN ECE CONTEXT Virgilio Gonzalez and Eric Freudenthal We report on the content of a pilot for a revised introductory programming course for ECE students titled “Software Design I, modified” (SDIm). SDIm incorporates pedagogical components from a course developed by our computer science department (CCS0) combined with an introduction to electric circuits and other ECE topics. SDIm is being developed in response to observations from several ECE faculty that many students, who attended the previously-offered courses in introductory C-programming had struggled with minor programming assignments throughout the ECE curriculum. The new course initially employs a simple interpreted programming environment based on “Python”. It uses simple small programs associated with mathematical and physical applications in order to illustrate the concepts of programming techniques combined with electric circuits. We expect that students will more quickly learn the fundamentals of and that they will effectively transfer these understandings to the study of C during the second half of the same course. Session S2G: Assessment and Faculty Development Chair: Wei-Fan Chen, The Pennsylvania State University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon G SYSTEMATIC MEANS FOR IDENTIFYING AND JUSTIFYING KEY ASSIGNMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE RULES-BASED PROGRAM EVALUATION Fong K. Mak and Jessica Kelly This paper presents an innovative practice which enhances previous well-tested processes for identifying key assignments and minimum passing criteria to include a rules-based performance vector for embedded course assessment. The modified process provides a common framework for faculty members to follow when justifying their selected key assignments as objective evidence to support meeting course outcomes and student outcomes. The modified framework has resulted in the use of consistent language for justifying key assignments which has proven to eliminate a lot of unnecessary discussion during the evaluation process, in turn streamlining the evaluation process. INCORPORATING PEER REVIEW OF COURSE TERM PROJECT IN STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS COURSE Luciana R. Barroso and James R. Morgan Students frequently find their junior year challenging as those courses provide the transition between lower-level courses where fundamentals are emphasized and upper-level design courses where instructors assume prior knowledge. Project-based learning provides a great instrument for students to enhance their learning and further develop critical engineering skills. However, students still struggle when not given exact procedural steps and want the reassurance they are ‘doing the correct thing.” This paper presents the implementation of a peer-review cycle into the team course project of a structural analysis course. The peer review process asks students to evaluate and provide feedback on both the analytical content as well as the written presentation of the project. This process allows students

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 172 Saturday Sessions to see different approaches, both in analysis and in presentation, to the same problem. Their familiarity with the problem allows them to provide constructive feedback, while reviewing the work of another group allows them an objectivity they cannot yet apply to their own work. The peer review cycle not only enhances the learning of the material for the course, but it is also a critical engineering skill for students. LEADING ENGINEERING LEARNING AND TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA Frank Bullen, Peter Gibbings and Lyn Brodie The drive for improved leadership in learning in teaching in the Australian tertiary sector is well established with the establishment of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) and the funding of the Leadership for Excellence in Learning and Teaching Program by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). A core feature of TEQSA is to ensure that the predicted increased participation in tertiary education is accompanied by an improved quality of university teaching and learning. The major outcome of the ALTC program is to enhance the quality of learning and teaching through better leadership capacity. The Federal Government has set aside $57 million to have TEQSA be fully operational by 2013 and the ALTC has invested many millions into projects on leadership in learning and teaching. This paper explores the role of the associate dean- learning and teaching as a pivotal point to improve leadership, in the context of engineering education. PERCEIVED DIFFERENCES IN TUTOR GRADING IN LARGE CLASSES: FACT OR FICTION? Keith Willey and Anne Gardner For many years the authors have coordinated a large engineering design subject, having a cohort of approximately 300+ students. Lectures are supported by tutorials of approximately 32 students which incorporate collaborative team learning activities and project-based learning. Each tutor is responsible for grading the assessment tasks for students in their tutorial. A common issue is how to achieve a consistent standard of marking between different tutors. To address this issue the authors have used a number of methods including double-blind marking and remarking to support consistent grading. Despite mainly finding only small variations between the grading of different tutors a number of students still complained about a perceived lack of consistency. We theorised that differences in the feedback provided by tutors was a contributing factor to this perception. In this paper we report investigating this theory and finding that while students’ perception of difference in grading were not unfounded, the problem was exacerbated by inconsistencies in the language tutors use when providing feedback.

WORK IN PROGRESS - FUTURE ENGINEERING PROFESSORS' CONCEPTIONS OF LEARNING AND TEACHING ENGINEERING Ana T. Torres-Ayala Prior studies indicate a teacher's conceptions of teaching influences teaching practice. Although there is abundant research on teachers’ conceptions of teaching and students' conceptions of learning, there is a dearth of information on future engineering professors' conceptions. The development of conceptions of learning and teaching is not well understood either. This work-in-progress paper presents a study exploring future engineering professors' conceptions of learning and teaching engineering. The study also explores what these future professors describe as the reasons for those conceptions. For this study, future engineering professors are defined as doctoral students in engineering programs who intend to pursue teaching careers in higher education. These students' conceptions are explored through semi-structured interviews. Phenomenographic methods are used to identify variations in conceptions of learning and teaching engineering. Understanding these conceptions can help educators and faculty developers facilitate the development of more complex and appropriate conceptions of learning and teaching. Session S2H: Laboratory Experiences Chair: Pete Hylton, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon H MAKING FAILURE THE MOTHER OF SUCCESS Xiang Fu, Kai Qian, Kent Palmer, Boris Peltsverger, Brian Campbell, Billy Lim and Paul Volt Do students really welcome failure, the mother of success? This paper reports the implementation of a trial-and-failure learning strategy, in both entry and senior level computer science classes. The idea is simple: given a sophisticated course project, let students try project submissions as many times as they want before the project deadline. For each submission, a thorough inspection is performed by an automated grading system called APOGEE. A student project has to accomplish not only the functional requirements but also many desired quality attributes such as robustness and security. In 2009, the trial-and-failure strategy has been adopted by four universities in five class sections. We report some interesting observations from student survey results, e.g., one can find out if factors like students’ positive experiences of programming, choice of programming language, years of working experience,

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 173 Saturday Sessions and instructors are predictive variables for positive attitudes toward the trial-and-failure learning experience as a whole. UAV AUTOPILOT CONTROLLERS TEST PLATFORM USING MATLAB/SIMULINK AND X-PLANE Lucio Regis Ribeiro and Neusa Maria F. Oliveira Presently there is vast interest in UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) development given its civilian and military applications. One of the main UAV components is the autopilot system. Its development invariably demands several lab simulations and field tests. Generally after an UAV crash few parts remain usable. Thus, before embedding an autopilot system, it has to be exhaustively lab tested. With educational and research purposes in autopilot control systems development area, a test platform is herein proposed. It employs Matlab/Simulink to run the autopilot controller under test, the flight simulator X-Plane with the aircraft to be commanded, a microcontroller to command model aircraft flight control surfaces and a servo to drive these control surfaces. These resources are interconnected through data communication buses. So that, the autopilot controller designed on Matlab/Simulink is tested by controlling an aircraft on X-Plane. The inputs given to the aircraft flight control surfaces in the X-Plane are simultaneously sent to the microcontroller which translates these commands into effective servo movement control. Through this platform, designed autopilot systems can be applied into models similar to real aircraft minimizing risks and increasing flexibility for design changes. As study case, tests results from a roll attitude autopilot system are presented. WORK IN PROGRESS - A GLOBAL GRID OF EDUCATIONAL ONLINE LABS BASED ON THE MIT ILAB SHARED ARCHITECTURE Michael E. Auer and Danilo Garbi Zutin Technology-enhanced learning is becoming a new important trend in higher education worldwide. In particular, engineering education is becoming an exciting emerging field of research because it involves a multitude of disciplines which aim to resolve the pedagogical problems that arise with the advancement of technology. This paper discusses the creation of a common grid of online laboratories based on a semantic web portal and service broker platform including experiment applications for the use in different levels of education. The so called Web 3.0 technology is actually growing daily and is proposed to be one of the leading Web technologies within the next years. Improved search and publishing mechanisms are some key features of the self-growing grid. Online laboratories are interactive experiments which are available over the Internet and can be divided into two main groups, software simulations and laboratories made up of real hardware equipment.

WORK IN PROGRESS - A HANDS-ON ABILITY INTERVENTION Anna Pereira and Michele H Miller Hands-on ability is considered an important skill for success in engineering. It also plays a role in attitude toward engineering. Despite its importance, engineering curricula do not necessarily provide all students with experiences that help develop hands-on ability. With the goal of developing educational experiences that better meet students’ needs and increase hands-on self-efficacy, this research investigates the effect of solitary practice as an intervention for improving hands-on ability. A reverse engineering lab activity in a low stress environment served as the intervention. The activity was individual to allow students to complete the activity at their own pace. Students in a treatment group and control group completed an engineering attitude survey, a mechanical aptitude test, and a prior experience survey. Comparison of the results for the control and treatment groups did not provide evidence that the intervention had an effect on hands-on ability or self-efficacy. Future work will include pre and post testing of the treatment group as well as an intervention of longer duration. PROVISIONING VIRTUALIZED DATACENTERS THROUGH VIRTUAL COMPUTING LAB Peng Li, Lee Toderick and Joshua Noles Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is an Apache licensed, open source, on demand, remote access system that dynamically provisions computing resources to end users. In the hands-on labs for the new course Virtualization Technologies, each student installs and administers a virtualized datacenter, which contains two VMware ESX servers, a VMware vCenter server and a data storage server. In a normal lab environment, these servers require high-end hardware to run. Instead of using expensive physical machines to set up the physical datacenters, we created a VCL virtual environment which included four virtual machines that hosted ESX servers, the vCenter server and the Openfiler iSCSI/NFS storage server. The virtual datacenter image can be loaded, on demand, on VCL blade servers. As a result, every student has the opportunity to manage her/his own virtual datacenter and complete hands-on exercises, individually, at any time and from any place. Our virtual datacenter image is different from other typical VCL virtual environments in that Windows/Linux virtual machines are deployed on the virtual machines running ESX servers - a VM-inside-VM solution. VCL provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for students to learn

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 174 Saturday Sessions virtualized datacenter skills and cloud computing administration. Session S2J: Global Issues in Engineering V Chair: Melany M. Ciampi, OPASS - Safety, Health and Environment Research Organization Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 10:00 am - 11:30 am Salon J WORK IN PROGRESS - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION FOR UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLARS THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM LOUIS STOKES ALLIANCE FOR MINORITY PARTICIPATION Ariana Arciero, Benjamin C Flores and Helmut Knaust Since 1992 the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a state-wide Alliance with the University of Texas (UT) System under the auspices of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). Currently in its fourth phase, the UT LSAMP maintains its vision of producing high-quality STEM researchers from underrepresented backgrounds through the proven method of intensive undergraduate research and an international travel component. This component was implemented based on our belief that all STEM graduates should be competitive in a global economy. To date, nineteen students have participated in these international activities. The expectation is that each student involved will understand that effective STEM research is truly an international collaboration. All STEM students should think “globally” whether preparing to enter academia or industry. This paper discusses our experiences with international travel coordination, strategies for conference and student selection, faculty observations, and student perceptions before and after the international experience.

A CASE-STUDY APPROACH TO INTRODUCING ENGINEERING STUDENTS TO NONTECHNICAL WASTEWATER ENGINEERING CONSTRAINTS: COMPARISON ACROSS COURSES AND CONTROLS Junko Munakata Marr By studying closed-ended technical problems, senior undergraduate and early graduate students may not appreciate critical interrelations between technical and nontechnical aspects of engineering in both the developed and developing world. To address this gap, a team of engineering and liberal arts faculty created a module on sanitation engineering for the developing world. Two different faculty teams subsequently implemented the module in two different senior/graduate level courses to test transferability. In both courses, students were assigned a semester-long design project, on which they worked in teams to design a sanitation solution for a small remote local community. In addition, students developed case studies as a means to broaden and deepen their understanding of nontechnical issues of wastewater engineering. Based on design project reports and tests administered before and after case-study development, significant increases were observed in student understanding of technical and nontechnical sanitation issues in both courses. In contrast, a control group showed no significant change. This paper presents a detailed statistical and qualitative analysis of the module’s impact in two different classroom implementations and compares these results with a control group.

WORK IN PROGRESS - SOFT SKILLS WITHIN A PROJECT - BASED APPROACH:A MULTIMEDIA ENGINEERING DEGREE Oscar Garcia-Panella and Anna Badia-Corrons We are introducing a new and complete set of methodologies based on a real project-based approach. Our Multimedia Engineering students work within interdisciplinary groups "simulating" several industrial specific roles in order to solve actual problems for real clients with concrete environmental parameters. In addition to all of these, we are focusing on all the required soft skills and competences, both specific and generic, within the Multimedia Engineering product lifecycle. LEADERSHIP EDUCATION FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS David J. Bayless and T. Richard Robe The interdependency of technical and socio-economic problem solving has increased the need for engineers, inherent problem solvers, to improve the development of their “soft skills.” Our ability to compete and innovate in an ever flattening world depends on engineers bringing envisioned solutions to fruition through leadership. Yet for the most part, engineering students are not exposed to formal studies in leadership. Instead, most engineering curricula focus on communications skills and anticipate that the graduate will acquire leadership skills either through employer training or via observation and “on-the-job” action. This deferral to employers for leadership development could possibly put the engineer at a disadvantage compared to other graduating majors where leadership is emphasized (e.g., Business), and reduce the competitiveness of our workforce that depends on realization of technical innovations to spur job creation. In response to this need, Ohio University’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology established the T. Richard and Eleanora K. Robe Leadership Institute (RLI) in 1996. Since its founding, the Institute

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 175 Saturday Sessions has promoted and encouraged effective leadership for college students, faculty, and staff through a wide variety of activities, awards, classes, and guest speakers that would allow them to reach beyond their professional competence. The focus on learning leadership concepts, styles, self-realization, and personal interactions with established leaders develops the student’s own leadership style and prepares them to maximize future leadership opportunities. This paper will present the pedagogy used by the RLI in the annual leadership course offered to the Russ College’s most promising student leaders. This course includes literature survey on leadership concepts, study of emotional intelligence and personal leadership styles, team building, and discussions/interactions with invited leaders, along with journals for reflection on each course activity. Details of the course structure, assignments, and interaction with the speakers will be presented. A SIMULATION SOFTWARE WITH INTERACTIVE TUTORIALS, VIRTUAL BREADBOARD, AND VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING LOGIC CIRCUIT DESIGN Arturo Miguel-de-Priego An easy-to-use computer program to teach and learn the foundations of the logical design with standard and custom integrated circuits has been designed, developed and tested. The software provides interactive tutorials to learn about the operation and description of integrated circuits; a virtual logic module where users can insert chips, trace wires, change switches, and check outputs in displays, almost as in a real laboratory; virtual environments to test circuits as if they were in the real world. Users can design digital applications with more components, and reuse their designs to show more examples and study more applications, while saving time and money. This software, shared freely in the Internet, also serves as a supporting tool of a project-based learning methodology. By searching Spanish words “simulador circuitos digitales”, references to this software are found within the first search results. Today, the software is used in many high schools and universities in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Session S3A: Special Session - Frontiers of Spatial Cognition: Moving Beyond Rotating Cubes Chair: Alisha A. Waller, Learning with Alisha! LLC Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon A SPECIAL SESSION - FRONTIERS OF SPATIAL COGNITION: MOVING BEYOND ROTATING CUBES Alisha A Waller and Stella Lourenco Spatial reasoning and visualization skills are critical skills for Computer Science, Engineering, and Technology (CSET) students. The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualizations of Rotations (PSVT:R) is considered the "gold standard" of spatial assessments and is a paper-and-pencil test that requires the mental rotation of three-dimensional connected cubes. Consistently, results on this test show sex differences, with men performing better than women. Spatial cognition is more than just mental rotation, however, and CSET education needs a variety of assessment tools and methods. In this session, participants will engage in a variety of spatial reasoning and visualization problems to expand their understanding of this area. We will explore different ways to assess spatial skills and consider the complex interactions of context, resources, and multiple strategies. By reviewing the literature on how children develop spatial understanding, CSET faculty can expand the options they consider when designing learning opportunities and assessment methods for college students. Another thread woven throughout this session is the consideration of differential performance of subgroups on various tests of spatial skills. The PSVT:R and tests like it often show sex differences and SES differences in performance, especially under timed-response conditions. In this session, we will consider potential explanations for these differences and outline some open areas for research. Session S3B: Special Session - Moving From CCLI to TUES - Meeting NSF Expectations Chair: Russell L. Pimmel, National Science Foundation Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon B SPECIAL SESSION - MOVING FROM CCLI TO TUES - MEETING NSF EXPECTATIONS Ning Fang, Ann McKenna, Don L. Millard, Lance C. Pérez and Russell L. Pimmel Engineering faculty members interested in education research and development projects need NSF funding to support their efforts. This session aims to enable the participants to prepare more competitive curriculum development proposals to the NSF Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (TUES) Program, the replacement for the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory (CCLI) Program. The session should make them aware of the expanded expectations defined in the new Solicitation and prepare them to develop proposals that meet these expectations.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 176 Saturday Sessions Session S3C: Recruitment and Retention II Chair: Wendy Otoupal-Hylton, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon C WORK IN PROGRESS - CARBON NANOMATERIALS: A PLATFORM TO TEACH FUNDAMENTALS OF NANOELECTRONICS Azad Naeemi A new graduate-level course entitled “Carbon Nanoelectronics,” offered in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology uses carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene as a platform to teach the fundamental nanoelectronic concepts. CNTs which are rolls of single layer carbon sheets and graphene which is a sheet of carbon atoms are promising materials for a host of applications from transistors and interconnects to sensors and electron guns. Their wide verity of applications, their simple structure, and their true one- or two-dimensional nature make them excellent choices for teaching the science and engineering aspects of nanoelectronics. EARLY TOOLS TO STEER ENGINEERING CALLINGS Roxana Saint-Nom, Ana Maria Gonzalez Ferro and Andres Carlos Rodriguez In a prestigious and small private university devoted to Engineering, the admission process has been modified to include an interactive course about the purpose and requirements of applied sciences, called “Communication to Engineering”. Prospective students are introduced to engineering skills, ethics, design processes and the importance of basic science. They also develop an engineering project at the conceptual level, where group activities are encouraged and communication skills trained, resulting in a valuable tool to introduce real world issues. After submitting a detailed written report, students overcome a debate, where they had to show their newly acquired engineering style of thinking. After five years of practice, results have shown that our innovative course has helped the Engineering School in two significant ways: Attrition rates during freshman year have fallen by more than 10%. Student oral and written communication skills were enhanced. Conclusions were obtained from surveys among freshman’s professors and students’ interviews.

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN FRESHMAN ENGINEERING STUDENTS' IDENTIFICATION WITH ENGINEERING Olga Pierrakos, TK Beam, Heather Watson, Erin Thompson and Robin Anderson Despite a significant increase in efforts to recruit and retain more engineering students through initiatives such as learning communities, mentoring, and pre-college programs, the decline in engineering enrollment continues. Recent research and some of our previous work suggest that students’ identification with engineering plays a critical role in their decision to pursue engineering and to persist. Herein, we present findings from a survey that was developed and piloted to freshman engineering students (N=45) to provide us insight into the development of an engineer identity. Survey items, primarily comprised of open-ended questions, were developed based on our prior interview data and analysis aimed at understanding factors pertinent to students identifying with engineering. We present comparative analyses of male and female responses of freshmen engineering students. Our findings suggest that there are significant gender differences in how freshman students identify with engineering and with becoming an engineer. The findings of this study have key implications for improving recruitment and retention. RECRUITMENT, RETENTION, AND PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AT ILLINOIS Jeremiah Johnson, Lizanne DeStefano and Elisa Mustari The purpose of this study was to better understand the entering characteristics, patterns of performance, attrition rates and reasons for leaving, and experiences of undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Engineering and other engineering disciplines, with particular emphasis on those from traditionally underrepresented groups and other subgroups of interest. All students in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were asked to participate in this study. The study was initiated under the assumption that aggregate data related to issues faced by engineering students would be used to inform discussions and decisions related to a variety of policies and practices employed by the College of Engineering. The topics covered during this study ranged broadly, but generally related to one of the following: 1) general student satisfaction; 2) recruitment and retention; 3) departmental climate; 4) students’ experiences; and 5) discrimination and harassment. Engineering administrators, department heads, faculty and student representatives had a voice in the design and oversight of this study, which was conducted by a team of local evaluators.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 177 Saturday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - RETENTION AND FIGS: INSTITUTIONAL VERSUS ENGINEERING MAJOR EFFICACY Mary Virnoche, Eileen Cashman, Elizabeth Eschenbach and Rees Hughes In an attempt to retain students, institutions have implemented programs focused on “the first year experience”. Many institutions link their first-year programs to specific disciplines, calling these programs freshmen interest groups or “FIGs.” In this research we explore the extent to which this FIG model, found in other research to be effective for improving general institutional retention, can be extended to improve major specific retention in Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE) at Humboldt State University. Analysis from institutional and departmental sources on three cohorts of freshmen ERE majors in FIG (n=29) and Non-FIG (n=15) groups, as well as other non-ERE FIGS groups indicates that ERE freshmen enrolled in FIGs continued to their sophomore year at HSU at the same average rate as students in other FIGs (76%) and at a significantly higher rate than all Non-FIG freshmen (72%). However, FIG participation did not affect retention in the engineering major itself. Our study suggests that the FIG model best addresses the instabilities of transition into college and that major retention in science and engineering is a more complex phenomenon that the current FIGs model does not address. Data for two additional cohorts of freshmen (n=65) will be added to this analysis and the combined results will be reported at the conference. A QUALITATIVE EVALUATION OF AN ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM Mary Anderson-Rowland Since fall 2002 Academic Scholarship Programs have been conducted in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. The purpose of the programs is to retain and to graduate the participants, to expand their understanding of the engineering profession, and to have the students go right on to graduate school full-time. The Academic Scholarship Programs are open to upper division students who have at least a 3.0 GPA and have unmet financial need. An emphasis is placed on including women and underrepresented minority students. Six meetings are held each semester for the students with assignments designed to make them better students and to have them learn about research and graduate school. One of the assignments for the Spring 09 students was an essay on how the program did or did not help them. In particular they were asked to describe what in the program helped them the most. The students responded with many aspects of the program including: the money, the Guaranteed 4.0 Plan for study skills, the time management schedule, updating their resume with a check list each semester, graduate school encouragement, and the exposure to and interaction with industry representatives. A few students also talked about parts of the program that were not helpful to them. The assignment shows that the program plan is useful to the students and should be continued. Session S3D: Oral and Written Communication Chair: Terrell L. Strayhorn, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon D CHANGES IN A FIRST-YEAR TECHNICAL WRITING CLASS TO SUPPORT STUDENT SUCCESS AND RETENTION IN ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES Thomas Swartz, Edmund Tsang and Kimberly Harms Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME) 1020, Technical Communication, is a first-year technical communication course designed for first-year College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) students at Western Michigan University (WMU). The course meets the university’s General Education Writing Proficiency One requirement and is part of the core pre-engineering/pre-engineering technology program. Beginning with discussions amongst STEM faculty on how best to aid student retention while meeting course outcomes, the course coordinator has instituted a series of changes to the course syllabus and requirements including an emphasis on career exploration and development, research writing, and lifelong learning awareness. IME 1020 has also become an anchor course for the STEP (STEM Talent Enhancement Program) Learning Communities where interaction with faculty, and programs emphasizing early intervention and academic etiquette are contributing positively to an increase in first-year student retention rates. EXPERIENCES FROM USING CONSTRUCTIVE CONTROVERSY IN AN OPEN ENDED GROUP PROJECT Mats Daniels and Åsa Cajander The purpose of this paper is to inspire other educators to aspire to true collaboration in student projects by presenting experiences from two course instances where speed dating were used in the light of constructive controversy ideas. The educational setting is an international student project based on an open ended group project framework in which scaffolding is introduced to ensure that essential teamwork skills become part of the learning experience for the students. An action research approach has been used by the authors to both develop the course and acquire information about the learning outcomes. The particular focus in this paper is to report findings about if and how 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 178 Saturday Sessions constructive controversy can be used in the scaffolding. WORK IN PROGRESS - SINGING YOUR WAY TO BETTER COMMUNICATION SKILLS - MUSIC IN ENGINEERING ENGLISH Indira Chandrasekhara Pillai and Lakshmi Chengankal The paper is based on a project launched in Hindustan Institute of Technology & Science, Chennai, India in 2009. It details an innovative methodology to teach English and improve interpersonal relations in a multilingual classroom using music taken from popular English culture. English language learning has been limited to English for Specific Purposes in the Engineering community in India since the last three decades. The paper studies how successful music is, as a mediational tool in teaching the language, specifically in improving spoken English. The improvement in speaking skills of 41 students is recorded from July 2009 to December 2010. Music is used as a means to bring intrinsic motivation and acculturation among learners and to utilize multiple intelligences of the learner by introducing audio visual perceptions of a foreign culture. The preliminary result shows that there is improvement in the speaking skills of the learners. WORK IN PROGRESS - A NOVEL METHODOLOGY TO REDUCE INSTRUCTORS' AND STUDENTS' PSYCHOLOGICAL BURDENS IN SOURCE CODE PLAGIARISM DETECTION Asako Ohno and Hajime Murao Detecting plagiarism in programming classes is a laborious task for instructors. Many methods have been proposed to reduce the physical strain on them, most of which measure algorithmic or structural similarity between a pair of source codes and are accurate in finding similar source codes. However, two important issues are yet to be discussed. Firstly, the similarity is not always caused by plagiarism; it could be caused by coincidence. Secondly, instructors might feel the burden of asking students if they have plagiarized someone’s source code, and students might feel the burden of being asked. In this paper, we introduce our novel index for source code plagiarism detection, which can be utilized to check the cause of the similarity outputted from existing methods, report the result of questionnaire investigation with 89 freshmen in our junior college, and discuss the possibility of reducing psychological burdens in source code plagiarism detection with our method. PROPOSAL OF EDUCATIONAL PODCAST FOR SCIENTIFIC LITERACY CLASSES IN ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE COURSES Pollyana Notargiacomo Mustaro Technological advances in the 21st century, especially in areas related to portability and mobility enabled the popularity of this kind of equipment for audio sharing, like educational podcasts. Podcasts are characterized as audio or video episodes with information that are made available on the Internet, allowing users to subscribe and automatically receive updates. Podcasts can complement face-to-face or virtual educational proposals through the establishment of learning dynamics that make the review and memorization/recovering process of topics worked in class simpler and more direct. They can also be used in scientific literacy classes as an element to establish a communication channel in the likes of a conversation, for example when dealing with another researcher in engineering and computer science courses. This approach can be combined with other computational resources with the intent of making the research and development process more contextualized and practical. As a result, it can expand the possibilities of interaction between teachers and students and make the process of knowledge construction more meaningful. In this sense, this paper presents a proposal for podcast episodes concerning scientific literacy, especially to research project development and the basic elements of scientific writing. It aims to contribute to the establishment of dynamics that facilitate the first challenges of novice researchers. WORK IN PROGRESS - LEADERSHIP TRAINING FOR NEW EECS GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTS Ding Luo, Matthew William Shuman and Donald Lee Heer The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University has newly designed a graduate leadership course for all new graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). The subject of leadership is approached by looking at the specific application of teaching as a form of leadership. This interactive training course is collaboratively designed and delivered by a graduate student who has sufficient leadership experience working as a teaching assistant for various levels of undergraduate courses. Having a graduate student with experience in leadership, as a role model, to train incoming GTAs creates natural learning communities within the classroom. During the duration of the course, GTAs are constantly interacting with the graduate instructor and their peers both inside and outside of the classroom. GTAs are also encouraged to practice their learning within their study group, research group, and working environment. Self-efficacy surveys are given to students in the new GTA Leadership course, and the results are used on evaluating the successfulness of this course. Lessons learned and future work are also discussed.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 179 Saturday Sessions Session S3E: Developing and Assessing Ethics from 6-20 Chair: Deborah Trytten, University of Oklahoma Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon K WORK IN PROGRESS - TECHNOLOGY AND GLOBAL ISSUES: A NON-TRADITIONAL COURSE IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM Steven Billis Traditionally, many Engineering programs create a one semester course in a lecture/dialogue format to demonstrate that their students attain the “soft” ABET outcomes (f) , (h) and (j) However, it is often the case that upon completion of this course, students are unable to demonstrate: critical/analytical thinking skills, ethical/ moral and civic engagement, a global perspective/world view. As a result, graduating engineers have not gained a fuller understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship. In 2005, NYIT initiated NYIT 2030. A key initiative of NYIT 2030 was a new “Discovery Core Curriculum”. As a result, all students must choose one course from each of four seminar categories .These core seminars are guided by three principles: Active Learning; Interdisciplinary and Discipline Specific Content; Research projects that are writing intensive. This presented the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences (SoECS) with the opportunity to create a new Core seminar IENG 400 “Technology and Global Issues” that would engage students more fully. This paper will describe the work, guided by the three principles of a core seminar, that has been completed so far. HALLELUJAH! USING TOPICAL EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE ETHICAL AND BUSINESS ISSUES FOR ENGINEERS Tom McEwan and Sandra Cairncross Technically-oriented undergraduate students are often reluctant to engage with “Legal, Social, Ethical and Professional Issues”. In particular many learners appear to have an increasingly cavalier attitude to intellectual property in digital media. Meanwhile local employers complain of graduates’ “unworldliness”. This case study describes the creation of a reusable learning object that uses topicality to make these issues seem more relevant to first year undergraduates in a School of Computing. Based on first delivery we identify principles for the design and maintenance of topical RLOs. One unexpected issue is how quickly topicality wanes and we identify that learners themselves are the best placed to identify future topical examples.

WORK IN PROGRESS - CAN ONE MEASURE OF ETHICAL "COMPETENCE" BE USEFUL IN VARIED UNDERGRADUATE, MULTIDISCIPLINARY SETTINGS? Jill May, Daniel Gandara, Herbert Edwards, Maham Subhani and Margaret Huyck Many educators would like to believe they are helping their students prepare to become intelligent, skilled, responsible – and ethical -- workers as they move into adult life. Most research has concluded that few schools have serious, well-designed programs to assess the ethical competence of their students and to ensure that the desired outcomes are met. Educators agree that it is desirable to measure the outcomes of our educational processes. But to measure, one must first identify the desired competencies. This has proven difficult. We will report on a multi-university research program designed to develop measure(s) of ethical “competence”, in order to identify best practices in developing those competencies. We will report on the three measures we are currently designing to measure ethical competence in these settings.

PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS' DECISION-MAKING ARGUMENTATION IN CYBER-ETHICS DILEMMAS Chun-Hsu Lin, Shih-Ming Huang, Pei-Shan Wu and Chiung-Hui Chiu This study involved 38 primary school students in a detective game about cyber-ethics dilemmas and explored students’ skills at making a reasoned decision and presenting a convincing argument. This game continued for five weeks and was supported by a computer system. It started with a given speculation/hypothesis. Then each student collected at least a piece of supporting evidence and wrote it up on the computer system for each week. During the evidence collection period, the researchers, playing a witness of the opposing side, actively provided refuting evidence each week. For the last week, the students were required to draw respective conclusions/decisions based on their collected evidence and given refuting evidence. All the students’ constructed arguments for describing evidences and conclusions were analyzed. It was found that most of the students (about 92%) developed arguments consisting of either claims only or claims and data. They would not be able to construct complicated arguments with backings, warrants and rebuttals.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 180 Saturday Sessions TEACHING BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING ETHICS: A CASE BASED APPROACH Scott Lewis, Warren VanHout and Aileen Huang-Saad In the fall of 2008, the University of Michigan, Department of Biomedical Engineering engaged industry representatives to introduce a new framework designed to teach graduate level engineering students about biomedical ethical issues in business situations. This framework was built on real-life case studies regarding quality problems in the medical device industry. Students were first introduced to a mini case involving a hypothetical product quality problem related to an implantable medical device. Then, students were divided into teams and assigned specific roles to develop a response. Students were given several days to develop a recommendation during which they could seek additional case information from industry representatives. As a wrap-up, the real-world device recall was presented to the students to highlight how the very same challenges the students faced in their teams were dealt with from an industry perspective. This framework provided both a mechanism to bring real-world ethical situations into the classroom and a method to foster a collaborative learning environment for the students. Of the several exercises used in class, this case-based group exercise was found to be the most effective at helping students understand real-world ethical decision making. WORK IN PROGRESS - ASSESSING MORAL DECISION MAKING SKILLS IN THE ENGINEERS OF 2020 Craig P Titus, Carla B Zoltowski and William C Oakes In the context of a large, multi-section, interdisciplinary design course, we have designed measures to integrate the instruction and assessment of moral decision making into the core curriculum. This paper provides an overview of our work currently in progress on one of these measures, our assessment instrument. We will describe the foundational pedagogical frameworks we explored, the existing instruments we considered, and the processes we used to design the instrument as it is currently. We will share lessons learned from the process of our work, including the mistakes we made and the path we took to arrive at our current direction. We will share what preliminary data we have, our experiences with initial pilots, and our thoughts on how this will influence our direction going forward. Finally, since this work is ongoing and dependent on our interaction with students, we will share our plans for the future, both short and long term. Session S3F: Innovative Courses Chair: Adrian Rusu, Rowan University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon E & F STUDIES AND PROPOSALS ABOUT INITIALPROGRAMMING LEARNING Anabela Gomes and António José Mendes The difficulties many novices feel to learn programming are well known. They don’t seem directly related to the programming paradigm or language used. We present some studies and proposals that may give some contributions to help students and reduce their difficulties in programming learning. We think it is crucial to get an in depth knowledge about the main factors that cause this problem. As the problem is complex, we used a triangulation of methods on a series of studies that we have carried through in recent years. The idea was to accumulate evidence and compare it with results of other studies published in literature. We joined and compared multiple sources of data and collated the methods in order to corroborate some conclusions. From the drawn conclusions concerning the main difficulties, we propose a set of suitable educative practices that, in our perspective, can help students learn, minimizing their programming difficulties. WORK IN PROGRESS - EVOLUTION OF A SYSTEM DYNAMIC COURSE AT PENN STATE BEHREND Yi Wu and Oladipo Onipede Over the last five years at Penn State Behrend a Systems Dynamics course has been offered in place of a “automatic control” course. The structure, benefits and challenges involved with this course are discussed. Even though the course is primarily a lecture type course several hands on and student initiated activities have been incorporated to motivate the students. Interdisciplinary application is another emphasis of this class. Feedback from students shows that the students highly value those features. There are indications that appreciation of the “systemic” approach to the modeling of dynamic systems is being accomplished. EXPERIENCES WITH TEACHING SECURE DATA MANAGEMENT Rajendra K. Raj and Richard Savacool In recent years, information security and assurance has received considerable attention from the computing community, with universities revamping course offerings in areas such as cryptography, network security, enterprise systems security, secure coding, and digital forensics. Although secure data management (SDM) is a major facet of overall information systems security, it has received less attention than it deserves. However, at the Rochester

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 181 Saturday Sessions Institute of Technology, an SDM course has been offered since 2003. This course covers both commercial practice and current research, and has been revised continually to keep the technical content current, and to incorporate active learning approaches; additionally course delivery has moved from a traditional classroom lecture setting to a blended and fully online (distance delivery) setting. On the practical side, student projects involve the design and development of secure database applications on hardened database servers, and include an attack phase when students get to break into other student projects. On the research side, students explore current topics in the literature and incorporate aspects of their research readings into their implemented projects. This paper discusses the SDM course, some measurements of student learning, and other experiences with the course. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTRODUCTION TO INNOVATION MODULES: A MULTI-FACETED APPROACH TO INTRODUCING INNOVATION TO FRESHMAN ENGINEERING STUDENTS Nathan R. Huntoon, Delores Etter and Marc P. Christensen The role of innovation and design is a key factor in differentiating leading engineers from their peers. Current engineering curriculum does not address this. We are currently using a variety of educational methods to introduce innovation as a concept throughout the engineering curriculum. A series of video podcasts on innovation have been generated which students can watch at their leisure. These video podcasts work together with in-class lectures that are more discussion based and open the door for insightful conversations regarding innovation. Utilizing online videos along with class discussion has enabled us to present innovation to all engineering students across disciplines by guest lecturing their each disciplines ‘Introduction to Engineering’ course. In addition, in-class exercises designed to encourage lateral thinking, as well as creative problem solving are used to teach basic design and innovation. All of the exercises are group projects that require the students to work in areas outside their area of expertise and encourage exploratory based learning. The curriculum for teaching education is still under development and in this paper we will present the initial curriculum and the results from the first semester this material was taught. WORK IN PROGRESS - DEVELOPMENT OF A HCI COURSE ON THE MICROSOFT SURFACE Aaron Striegel and Dirk VanBruggen With the advent of multi-touch devices, there exist exciting new opportunities for course development in the area of Human Computer Interfacing (HCI). From the most recent set of devices, the Microsoft Surface offers a set of unique capabilities and challenges for teaching a HCI course. The natural trend of the device towards simultaneous interactions with multiple users as well as the ability to recognize physical objects via byte tags offer fascinating teaching and laboratory experiences. In this paper, we will discuss our experiences in teaching a Surface-oriented course with regards to lecture and laboratory design. We will also offer insight with respect to student performance, student feedback, comparing those aspects versus efforts with the Nintendo Wiimote with regards to programming difficulty. Finally, we will conclude with suggestions for future course refinement.

VENDOR NEUTRAL HANDS-ON LABS USING OPEN-SOURCE PRODUCTS FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS COURSES Hetal Jasani In this paper, an undergraduate computer information technology special topic course in mobile and wireless networks is presented which is developed based on many hands-on lab activities. In learning the concepts of wireless networks via hands-on labs, students get ample opportunities to understand the underlying principles and concepts of wireless networks. These hands-on labs are chosen to provide sufficient challenges to the students that prepare the engineers and technologists for the next generation solutions. The level of difficulty for this course requires the prerequisites of networking course. The course requires the students to collaborate among them and participate in active learning based modules. This paper elaborates innovative projects that are suitable for laboratory work in computer information technology curriculum. It explores both hardware and software components that are now being used for practical exercises in wireless networks courses. This paper discusses the hands-on labs for wireless networks such as Medium Access Control layer settings, upgrading the firmware of wireless devices, etc. In addition, this paper also illustrates the wireless security labs which discuss how to set up Wi-Fi Protected Access on Cisco and Linksys wireless access points (AP).

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 182 Saturday Sessions Session S3G: Thinking about Thinking Chair: Susan Walden, University of Oklahoma Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon G INTEGRATING MATHEMATICAL THINKING, ABSTRACT THINKING, AND COMPUTATIONAL THINKING Kirby McMaster, Brian Rague and Nicole Anderson In recent years, several groups of Computer Science educators have made a sustained effort to capture the essence of CS apart from programming. Three of these approaches are Mathematical Thinking, Abstract Thinking, and Computational Thinking. Each approach tries to clarify areas of CS that are not directly tied to writing computer programs. In a separate line of research, the current authors have been examining different ways to teach mathematics to CS students. We developed a Computational Math scale that measures the level of problem-solving gestalt exhibited by textbook authors. In this study, we relate our Computational Math framework to current research on Mathematical, Abstract, and Computational (MAC) Thinking. We counted words used frequently in research articles and compared them to words that form the Computational Math scale. Our results suggest an overall MAC Thinking framework that integrates a wide range of topics relevant to computing and programming. UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM, ELEMENTS OF INDUCTIVE PRACTICE, AND STUDENT LEARNING STYLES ON SELECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES IN MATERIALS ENGINEERING Kathleen L. Kitto Research studies in engineering education indicate that students build scaffolds from existing cognitive structures to new information when the students are able to make connections to their existing knowledge base. That research is founded upon the basic principles of social and cognitive constructivism. The effectiveness of two such active course contexts is compared, thus evaluating the characteristics of effective context based active experiences. This study also investigated whether the two contexts resulted in different outcomes for students with different learning styles. The framework of the active experiences in a materials engineering course was changed from music strings and stringed instrument design to biomedical devices which experience significant loads in service because selected student outcomes were still below expectations. Simultaneously, the research project was changed from an individual activity to a cooperative learning experience. More in-class active experiences were also completed cooperatively. The net result was an improvement in thirteen student outcomes and in written and oral language usage. The effect of student learning styles on outcomes was not apparent, but they may be important in forming effective cooperative teams. Overall, stringed musical instruments were not as robust in building student outcomes when compared to the biomedical device approach.

WORK IN PROGRESS - STUDYING DESIGN COGNITION TO IMPROVE DESIGN EDUCATION Christopher B. Williams, John Gero, Marie C. Paretti and Yoon Lee This paper presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal study of design cognition. The project examines how engineering students develop design competencies over time by applying a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology. This analysis will be used to evaluate the effects of education on design cognition by following students in two curricula across three years (sophomore to senior). A large study pool from both programs completed spatial reasoning tests to determine overall population characteristics. A subset of this pool is now participating in verbal protocol studies in which students work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. This paper reports results of the spatial reasoning tests as well as preliminary results from the first set of protocol studies. THINKING IN A BRAND NEW WAY: EXPLORING THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF NANOTECHNOLOGY RESEARCHERS Ruth A. Streveler and Alejandra Magana This paper investigates the modes of thinking that may be required to understand the concepts central to nanotechnology. Six senior scientists at a large Midwestern university were interviewed to uncover their way of thinking about nanotechnology. The semi-structured interviewers were coded and analyzed to identify the researchers’ underlying concepts, ideas, and ways of thinking about nanoscale phenomena. In addition to confirming that previously identified concepts such as self-assembly are important for understanding nanoscience, interviews also pointed out that the concept of “defect” has a whole new meaning in nanomaterials. System thinking was also identified as central to understanding the nanoscale world.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 183 Saturday Sessions PROGRESSION OF STUDENT SOLUTIONS OVER THE COURSE OF A MODEL-ELICITING ACTIVITY (MEA) Mark T Carnes, Monica E Cardella and Heidi A Diefes-Dux This study is part of a larger project that focuses on the use of Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) as a means of developing problem-solving skills among first-year engineering students. The MEA used for this study required the development of a model that uses both mathematical and statistical measures to help an end user reach a decision. Each team ultimately produced two drafts of their solution and a final product. Between the drafts, the students had the opportunity to review sample solutions, give and receive peer feedback, and receive feedback from their graduate teaching assistants. A sample of 50 teams was randomly selected and each of their pieces of work was analyzed for types of mathematics and statistics used. The purpose of this paper is not to assess the quality of the students’ work, but to examine the patterns of change across the three versions of the student-developed models produced over the course of the MEA implementation. UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS' DIFFICULTIES IN TERMS OF COUPLED EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND AFFECTIVE DYNAMICS Ayush Gupta, Brian A Danielak and Andrew Elby Researchers have argued for students’ epistemology as connected to their affect, but at a coarse grain-size—treating epistemology as a belief or stance toward a discipline, and an emotional stance as applied broadly to a discipline or classroom culture[1]. A second, emerging line of research, however, shows that a student can shift between multiple locally-coherent epistemological stances [2]. To begin uniting these two bodies of literature, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into fine-grained models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of Judy, an undergraduate engineering major. We argue that a fine-grained aspect of Judy’s affect, her annoyance at a particular kind of homework problem, stabilizes a context-dependent epistemological stance she displays, about an unbridgeable gulf she perceives to exist between real and ideal circuits. Session S3H: Engineering Design Experiences II Chair: Larry G Richards, University of Virginia Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon H THE PROCESS OF DESIGNING A DESIGN PROCESS: AN OUTSIDE-THE-BOX ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY CAPSTONE COURSE Pete Hylton The Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) program at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) caters to a unique and diverse population of students. The students entering the program are divided between individuals fresh out of high school and preparing to pursue degrees full-time with an expectation of completion in four years and those who have already begun careers in industry and are seeking to improve their opportunities for advancement and whose expectation for graduation is further in the future. Thus, in catering to this diverse community of students, IUPUI’s MET program has experimented with some innovative, and non-traditional, approaches to course design. One area where this innovation has proved noteworthy is in the design of the MET capstone course, where three different formats are employed in an effort to meet the needs of the student population. This paper discusses one of those options which stretches the boundaries of capstone pedagogy and tradition.

WORK IN PROGRESS - SELECTION AND EXECUTION OF CIVIL ENGINEERING CAPSTONE DESIGN PROJECTS AT THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD ACADEMY Hudson Jackson, Kassim Tarhini, Corinna Fleischmann, Nathan Rumsey and Sharon Zelmanowitz In order to enable students to experience real life engineering problem solving, design, team work, project execution and management, civil engineering students at the United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) must complete a capstone project as a graduation requirement. To better prepare USCGA students for their unique future roles as civil engineers in the Coast Guard, most capstone projects involve working with Coast Guard officers and civilian engineers in the field on actual Coast Guard projects. Project selection criteria include funding for site visits, a mandatory design component, a reasonable project schedule, realistic stakeholder expectations and a good match with expertise of the faculty advisors. The capstone design teams are provided specific instructions to guide them through the execution of their capstone projects. The authors discuss the development and execution of successful capstone projects at the USCGA and provide strategies for meeting educational outcomes while ensuring projects are useful to the Coast Guard.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 184 Saturday Sessions WORK IN PROGRESS - A PROPOSED MODEL FOR MANAGING UNDERGRADUATE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ENGINEERING PROJECTS: A CAPSTONE CHALLENGE Mani Mina and Stephen D. Holland This paper discusses a new and innovative experience in designing, implementing, and improving a multidisciplinary class for engineering capstone design. The approach was designed and augmented in order to fulfill the ABET required capstone design in all departments in our College of Engineering. The objective of this innovative capstone experience is to create a broad, practical, and exciting alternative to traditional capstone senior design experiences. This paper presents and discusses the creation process of the class from the conceptual point to implementation, with a new idea of engaging relatively large teams of 8-12 students in each project. The paper also presents results from the industrial partners’ and students’ perspectives. EFFECTIVENESS OF ENGINEERING DESIGN FOCUS IN STRENGTH OF MATERIALS Cliff J. Lissenden, Peggy Van Meter and Nicholas J. Salamon Elementary strength of materials is a core undergraduate engineering course that introduces the mechanics of deformable bodies. Traditionally, the focus of the course is on analysis, but we have recast the course to apply analysis to design in order to better prepare students to become engineers – design being the primary function of practicing engineers. A semester-long design project has been implemented to provide an opportunity for students to practice design. Student teams design playground equipment including: conceptual layout, material selection, load specification, design analysis, drawings, cost estimate, and final report. A web site has been created to facilitate administration of the project, provide links to data sources, and give design analysis examples. This paper summarizes the design project and the tools created to ease the time burden associated with the project. The focus is on assessment of the effectiveness of the project. The results of the assessment over three semesters at Penn State are positive. Analysis of the data indicates that the students who completed the course with design emphasis are better skilled at design and perform equally at analysis relative to those students completing the traditional strength of materials course.

WORK IN PROGRESS - EXPLOITING HIGH-ALTITUDE BALLOONING AS A FRAMEWORK OF ECE SENIOR DESIGN PROJECTS Wookwon Lee and Fong K. Mak Senior Design is a challenging course for both students and the instructor and/or faculty advisors. To design the course that can create enjoyable learning environment and be effective in addressing the ABET criteria for student outcomes, we have adopted a high-altitude weather ballooning as the framework of projects for Senior Design. It is envisioned that the new framework better develops students’ ability for teamwork and effective communication, as well as, encouraging them to apply appropriate technical knowledge acquired through their overall education in electrical and computer engineering. In this Work-in-Progress paper, we describe our approach to formulating design projects for a high-altitude weather ballooning system. From the progress so far, we have observed that the design of a complete weather ballooning system is suitable for 3 teams each of which consists of 3 or 4 students, and that further revisions and enhancements may be suitable for 1 or 2 teams of students in subsequent years. RENEWABLE ENERGY: SENIOR DESIGN PROJECT EXPERIENCE Jean-Claude Thomassian and Yaqub Amani In recent years, there has been a considerable interest in Renewable Energy. This paper discusses an educational effort that incorporates Renewable Energy in a Senior Design course offered at a university in northeastern United States. The senior design project provides an environment that engage students in their studies. Multidisciplinary design teams were used whereby the students interact with their peers and with the faculty inside and outside of the class room/laboratory. Some design examples are offered to show our experiences of incorporating Renewable Energy projects in the senior design course. A concluding section discusses our experiences from offering such a course. Session S3J: Global Issues in Engineering VI Chair: Kim Blackmore, The Australian National University Time: Saturday, October 30, 2010, 1:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. Salon J THE UNED'S INTEROPERABLE VIRTUAL CAMPUS SERVICE MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernández, Timothy Read, Rafael Pastor, Manuel Castro, Miguel Rodríguez-Artacho and Antonio Robles-Gómez The creation and maintenance of a virtual campus is a task that not only implies the deployment of sophisticated hardware and software but also requires considerable effort in the integration of the main university management

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 185 Saturday Sessions systems with the chosen teaching tools present in the campus. Such integration requires the definition of a range of services tailored for the different user profiles. Hence, it has been necessary to develop a management environment for the virtual campus that enables it to be manipulated and controlled in an efficient manner where new services (above and beyond the basic e-Learning platform tools) can be integrated in a seamless fashion. The implementation of these services should guarantee a large degree of interoperability among virtual learning environments, VLEs and tools. To this end, some of these services have been implemented using the IMS Enterprise standard. This standard essentially contributes to the organization of a given e-Learning platform in terms of users, courses and roles therein; leaving to one side the formalization of other services more specific to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) together with the current technological framework. A COLLABORATIVE MODEL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION FOR COMPLEX GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTS Robin G. Qiu Although team-based projects have become a popular practice in colleges with focus on helping students learn subjects collaboratively and effectively, the current education paradigm mainly adopts ad hoc collaboration practices. There lacks a quantitative methodology for enabling appropriate and scientific approaches to guide the educational community in teaching and transforming educational practices to support the development, implementation, and improvement of state-of-the-art collaborative-learning practices on campuses. This paper presents a new computational model and framework to quantitatively explore the collaboration-based behavioral dynamics of student teams and its impact on team performance. More specifically, a suite of mathematical models in the form of computations, structural equation modeling, and principal component analysis are created to describe and analyze a variety of learning circumstances, aimed at generating rules of thumb to guide student teams to retune collaborative practices in a proactive and real-time manner for improved performance. TEACHING COMPUTER SCIENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: ENABLING LEARNING ROADMAPS FOR POST SECONDARY COURSES Miguel Oliveira and J. Artur Serrano This paper tends to present how eLearning strategies and policies used, in a Portuguese district (Aveiro), are enhancing learning and knowledge for heterogeneous audiences with constraints that are beyond the usual. Besides time to learn and physical distance, they face new challenges like, the need to get specialized in areas where economy is growing; where companies need to adapt to new markets; where the technology revolution is a priority. Experience achieved tells the professionals observed have shown great interest in eLearning actions and for a hybrid methodology. By a simple empirical evaluation, professionals agree that information and communication technologies (ICT) are, in fact, very helpful for those who have several constraints to learn. The use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) tends to accomplish the learning assessments and skills, although there are a lot of improvements that can be done through ICT, especially to promote self-study. The paper presents experiences done with a new learning application that enables a more intelligent and friendly content organization and promotes actor’s participation powering efficient learning. ENHANCEMENT OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN A COUNTRY: SOME CONSIDERATIONS Claudio da Rocha Brito and Melany M Ciampi With roots in Portugal, the engineering education in Brazil has a long history of success. The formation of engineers follows the old French formation model and the engineers formed both the engineer of conception and the engineer of application has been successful. Although there are many critics regarding the model it has showed to be still efficient and appropriate once it gives to the recent formed engineer not only a diploma, but also the professional qualification. This work has as objective to show and to discuss about the most important points of the engineering education in Brazil: the beginning, the development, its current state, the impact of the globalization and the perspectives for the future. A COMPLEX TUTORING SYSTEM FOR E-LEARNING: THE NEW EVALUATION MODEL Rafael Pastor, Roberto Hernandez, Salvador Ros, Timothy Read, Manuel Castro and Rocael Hernandez UNED (Spanish University for Distance Education) is the largest public distance education university in Spain with over 220,000 students, 1600 lecturers and 2000 administrative staff. Currently, the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) adapted new degrees have just started, so focusing on personal activities for the evaluation model is very important. In UNED, the number of students (near of 42000 students in the 120 subjects of its first course) makes the role of tutors who assist lecturers in the new evaluation model proposed by EHEA very important. Also, tutors must use the same e-learning platform tools as lecturers, in order to have a course evaluation control panel that follows a student’s learning process. In this paper, the course evaluation system will be presented and how it is

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 186 Saturday Sessions implemented in order to enable tutors to access only the grades of their students. As a result, some indicators will be presented in order to validate the approach of the new evaluation system for EHEA degrees: tutors with “activity” in their personal subgroups, number of degrees undertaken by the tutors, etc. WORK IN PROGRESS - INTERDISCIPLINARY INTEGRATION IN PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY Marcel J. Castro-Sitiriche, Christopher Papadopoulos and Héctor J Huyke Engineering Education is devoting more attention to key areas of concern such as global awareness, environmental impact, social and political considerations in decision making, and professional ethical issues. One strand of this inquiry is Philosophy of Technology, which treats social, political, and ethical issues embedded in technologies themselves. Another is Liberal Studies, in which socio-economic and socio-political issues that bear on engineering and technology are investigated. In an effort to organize and merge some of the ideas related to these fields, realities, and concerns, the Interdisciplinary Group on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology was established. The Group’s objectives and a description of its activities, including collaborations with other efforts and future projects, are presented. COMPETENCY PROFILE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION MANAGERS OF INDIA Badri Lal Gupta and Joshua Earnest National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research (NITTTR), Bhopal is a one of the four premier institutes established by the Government of India for the engineering education system of the country four decades back. NITTTR Bhopal has used innovative methods in training and development of engineering/technical education managers in the past. In the year 1990, it has shifted from content-based modular training programmes to competency-based training approach. Initially it has used this approach for developing known core competencies in technical education managers at various levels. The impact of this approach prompted the authors to undertake this research with the purpose of developing a competency framework to be used for a variety of human resource functions. Descriptive and survey type of research was adopted in which special purpose research instruments were designed, pilot tested, validated and implemented. This research study resulted in the emergence of new, unique and unknown competencies required for engineering education managers in the fast changing Indian engineering education system that is emphasizing on producing quality engineering graduates. This has also lead to the development of ‘competency framework’ which has become a basis for training, development, succession planning, career planning, deployment and re-deployment of education managers for fulfilling various purposes of the engineering institutions.

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 187 Saturday Sessions

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27-30, 2010 Arlington, Virginia 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 188