Engineering Innovation in Biomedical Nanotechnology

The objective of this National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded undergraduate engineering training project is to introduce nanoscale science and engineering through an innovative use of a technical elective sophomore-level mechatronics course, followed by an Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)-mandated senior-level engineering capstone design project. A unique partnership between University of Arizona’s department of surgery, its neurosurgical division, and the College of Engineering presents a creative environment, where medical residents serve as mentors for undergraduate engineering students in developing product ideas enabled by nanotechnology. Examples include: a smart ventricular peritoneal (VP) shunt with flow-sensing; a bio-resorbable inflatable stent for drug delivery, and a hand-held non-invasive eye tonometer. Results from the first year of the student projects, as well as qualitative assessment of their experience, is presented. Several institutional challenges were also identified.

Enhancing Engineering Learning Experience at UTB by Freshmen iHOP

Most of the engineering courses focus more on theory and very little on hands-on, project-based learning in the classroom. Integration of real-world engineering problems and applications in lower division engineering courses will produce engineering students, who will be technically sound and be able to execute and manage real-world projects, when they will do senior design projects in their final year of engineering study. To overcome the engineering design challenges we have developed iHOP (Ingenieŕia Hands on Project) and integrate it with our lower division engineering courses. iHOP has been developed to emphasis the design component at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) Engineering Physics curriculum and the project is now an integral part of Introduction to Engineering class. The iHOP project is one that is challenging, fun, requires teamwork, associated with the engineering material being studied, low cost, and doable in a limited amount of time. The experience from iHOP project motivates our freshman students to choose a better senior design project in senior year of their college career. The objectives of the iHOP projects are — to have students develop teamwork skills, and to teach students basic engineering design concepts in a complementary format to the traditional lecture. Various techniques related to team selection, encouraging teamwork, incorporation of engineering topics, keeping costs down, project results presentations, and gathering feedback from students will also be presented in this paper. Integrating iHOP Project with Introduction to Engineering class helped us to improve our retention effort in the engineering department.

Design and Instrumentation of an Experimental Test-Bed for Research in Energy Efficiency in Buildings

This paper reports on the development of a conceptual design, construction and instrumentation of an experimental facility that can be used to carry out experimental research towards increasing energy efficiency in buildings. The overarching idea is to construct a system that emulates the scaled dimensions and materials of a typical building structure. The sub-scale testbed consists of a two-floor building configuration with dimensions of 1.2 m × 0.92 m × 1.1 m. The building structure is made out of wood, and covered with drywall and fiberglass insulation. Fixed walls are selected for the first floor whereas movable walls are incorporated into the second floor to study the effects of different room configurations. Four staircase openings enable airflow between the two floors. The second floor has a tiled-style ceiling and removable walls that allow for connectivity of sensors and actuators. A set of heating and cooling sub-systems, consisting of light bulbs and thermoelectric coolers connected to fans, are used for each room in the building. Both the set of light bulbs as well as the cooling system are powered through a relay box, and connected to a computer via LabVIEW which also interfaces the different sensing and actuating devices. The capabilities of the experimental facility are tested by implementing time-dependent heating- and cooling-processes and an on-off control strategy on a two-room prototype. Preliminary results demonstrate that the experimental testbed offers a reliable and versatile experimental system for research purposes.

Use of Conceptual Questions With Prompt Feedback in Engineering Thermodynamics

An effective strategy to promote deep understanding in engineering thermodynamics is to increase the use of conceptual questions during lectures coupled with prompt assessment of student responses. A key is to collect responses from all students and provide prompt feedback explaining the correct response. It has been found that conceptual questions are more effective than numerical. Good questions explore if a quantity will increase, decrease or remain unchanged in response to a change in the system. In previous semesters, an instructor would pose conceptual questions during lecture and discuss with those students who participated with the instructor. Using an electronic collection system for student responses, all student responses can be collected and assesses. Results show that (1) it is rare that the entire class is correct even for the simplest of questions, (2) a nearly identical question can be repeated in a subsequent lecture and there will continue to be a incorrect responses, and (3) repeating questions throughout the semester is effective at addressing common conceptual misunderstandings and improving long-term student learning in engineering thermodynamics.

Women in Mechanical Engineering: The Gender (Im)balance by the Numbers

In this paper, we take a close look at the participation of women in Mechanical Engineering, through an analysis of scientific publications in the field. Using a large dataset of over 100,000 publications from the ASME digital library, the paper creates a picture of the gender preferences associated with areas in the field of Mechanical Engineering. We find that while the average percentage of women in the field is generally low (15.6%), there are significant differences between the percentages of women in different categories, with areas such as biomechanical engineering, energy management, renewable energy, and nanotechnology attracting a larger than average proportion of women. Additionally, we also analyze the change in the number of authors in different areas over 20 years of research in the field, and observe a significant growth in recent years for both genders in the areas of biomechanical engineering, nanotechnology, and computational engineering.

Educating Engineering Students on Probabilistic Risk: Effects on the Perception of Ethics, Professional Responsibility, and Personal Agency

To better understand how improved understanding of uncertainty and probability concepts in an engineering systems context would affect undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions of professional responsibility and ethics as well as personal agency (one’s ability to affect the outcome of events), an assessment of these principles was conducted during a related course. A course entitled Engineering Risk Analysis was offered and conducted with a mix of undergraduate Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Environmental Systems Engineering, and Architectural Engineering students. This course presented and trained students in the use of system analysis techniques from the disciplines of Reliability Engineering, Policy Analysis, and Economics for understanding how uncertain circumstances interact with technological systems to produce failures and disasters. As engineering systems become increasingly complex and command greater quantities of energy, the risk of failures even when very rare, become much more severe. While there have been previous initiatives to increase engineering students’ understanding of statistics, probability, and risk, usually in response to previous disasters, this preliminary study is the first to begin to examine how this kind of knowledge affects engineering student’s perceptions of ethics, responsibility, and their concept of how their own individual decisions affect the potential for the failure of complex systems and the consequences of such failures. Students completed 5 regular survey-based assessments to judge their qualitative and quantitative skills, personal perceptions of the causes of engineering failures, and the professional and ethical responsibilities of engineers. Analysis of the response variance and a linear regression model demonstrated some significant effects after controlling for education, age, and professional work experience. Results indicate that questions related to probabilistic understanding of risk demonstrated the most significant change during the course. Indicators of agreement with strong professional ethics and greater professional responsibility as well as personal agency did not significantly change during the course. More importantly, while personal choices on risk did not appear to reflect one’s view of how engineers actually do or should treat questions of risk professionally, the amount of previous technical work experience showed a small positive association with increased agreement on statements of ethical responsibility towards workers and the public. These findings suggest that future research is needed to assess the types of instruction and personal experience that can best encourage the combination of strong ethical responsibility and personal agency that could empower engineering students to act when they have the opportunity to reduce risk to workers, the public, or the environment.

Panorama of the Market Demand for Mechanical Engineers in South American Countries

Many educational institutions employ surveys in order to identify what majors to offer or what competencies to emphasize in their curricula. Different from a survey, we present an analysis of the labor market needs based on data collected from job ads available in the Internet. Tools of natural language processing (NLP) and statistical techniques have been employed to handle the job ads. For Peru, Chile and Colombia, a detailed panorama of the market demand has been depicted: mechanical engineering appears among the top most demanded engineering majors and maintenance is its most frequent technical requirement; management (project, quality and operations) related requirements also rank high, together with a working knowledge of English. By using diverse visualization techniques we can also show the “social network” of a major, where friendship is defined by the amount of job ads shared by any two majors.

Action, Practice and Research in Project Based Learning in an Industrial Engineering and Management Program

Engineering is a profession that suffers from rapid obsolescence because of constantly new market needs. Therefore, the engineering education curriculum must be adapted to accommodate change and to prepare as well as possible new engineers. To achieve this, Project-Based Learning (PBL) as an active learning methodology, assumes greater importance. PBL has been implemented for a decade (since 2004/05) in the first semester of the first and fourth year of the Master Degree in Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) at University of Minho, Portugal, by a team of IEM teachers. This paper describes this last decade of teaching, learning and researching in a PBL environment in this degree. PBL engages students in their own learning. In IEM program, PBL also engaged teachers in improving their teaching methods by questioning continuously these. Throughout ten years, the coordination team of IEM program faced many challenges and brought significant contributions to discussion, researching on how PBL process in IEM could be improved and studying different PBL models for different students’ needs. By following this path, this paper disseminates the practices researched in PBL process of IEM program and the benefits founded by applying this learning methodology through an analysis of the results of this research published in international conferences, journals and books (more than 70 publications). In light of the results achieved, as well as feedback from researchers and students, the authors believe that PBL is one of the best practices for student learning and teacher engagement.

Vertically Integrated Projects: Improving the Overall University Competition Experience

Beginning in 2009, Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) courses have been implemented at Georgia Tech. These VIP classes allow undergraduate students to receive academic credit for participating on teams that further faculty research efforts. The teams are multidisciplinary, vertically-integrated, and long-term. Participation on these teams has been shown to help students develop an understanding of project timelines, and effective project communication, while gaining other applicable real-world experience. EcoCAR 3 is the latest in a series of Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions (AVTCs) sponsored by the Department of Energy since 1988. At Georgia Tech, the EcoCAR 3 team has been structured using the VIP program to improve the all-around experience of faculty members and the graduate and undergraduate students. Based on Georgia Tech’s previous experience in EcoCAR 1, the team leadership hoped to increase participation of undergraduate students, improve collaboration between students and faculty members, and raise retention levels. The team has shown improvements in each of these categories through implementation of the VIP program. Some of the primary challenges that the team experienced during the first year of competition are also presented here, along with plans for further improvement in future years of the competition.