March 2007

Welcome to the March issue of Connections, the American Society for Engineering Education's free e-newsletter.

Spotlight On Our Sponsors:

• NI & Vernier Data-Acquisition Interface www.vernier.com/sensordaq
  
  

• Join the Autodesk Faculty Lounge
  www.students.autodesk.com
  
  

• Free Agilent Tips for USB, LAN and GPIB
  www.get.agilent.com
  
  

• Help Students Explore Great Career Opportunities
  at Baker Hughes
  www.bakerhughes.com
  
  

• Nominate a Mentor for the 2008 NAE Awards
  www.nae.edu/2007awards

The Vernier SensorDAQ is a data-acquisition interface that offers convenience and power to science and engineering educators with USB connectivity and the ability to automatically detect Vernier sensors. Vernier and National Instruments, two of the most respected names in science and engineering, have collaborated to create the powerful, affordable interface for use with over 50 Vernier sensors and NI LabVIEW software. Learn more: www.vernier.com/sensordaq

Join the Autodesk Faculty Lounge and get free design software, teaching tools, and more. www.students.autodesk.com

 Free Agilent Tips for USB, LAN and GPIB

Free Agilent Tips and Tricks for Using USB, LAN and GPIB
This 12-page application note provides a variety of tips and tricks that will help you create flexible test systems that can easily incorporate USB, LAN, GPIB and RS-232C. Click here to learn more.

Do you know an engineer whose commitment, passion, brilliance, and persistence have inspired you to greater achievement in your career? If so, we invite you to nominate him or her for a 2008 National Academy of Engineering award.

Welcome to the World of K–12 Engineering!

Introducing engineering into the K–12 classroom connects science and math concepts to the everyday engineering that surrounds us. TeachEngineering.com helps teachers enhance learning, excite students and stimulate interest in science and math through the use of hands–on engineering. With a fully searchable, digital library of standards–based lesson plans, and a myriad of “Living Laboratories” that bring real–world engineering principles into the classroom, TeachEngineering's comprehensive curricula are hands–on, inexpensive, and relevant to children's daily lives.

TeachEngineering.com is a joint effort of the University of Colorado, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Colorado School of Mines, Duke University, Oregon State University, and the American Society for Engineering Education, and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Bring the world of engineering into the K–12 classroom with TeachEngineering.com. You don’t need knowledge of engineering to use these curricula!

Search TeachEngineering.com’s digital library at
www.teachengineering.com.

New and Improved Journal of Engineering Education!

The Journal of Engineering Education is a peer-reviewed international journal published quarterly by the American Society for Engineering Education. It serves as an archival record of the leading scholarly research in engineering education.

Visit www.asee.org/jee/ to read it online.

It's Time Again to Go For It!

In this Issue:

I. Databytes

• Bachelor’s Degrees By Residency, 2004-2005
• Master’s Degrees By Residency, 2004-2005
• Doctoral Degrees By Residency, 2004-2005

II. Congressional Hotline

• Bush Proposes $143 Billion Federal Investment in R&D; Science and Technology Spending Declines for Fourth Straight Year
• FY 2008 Budget Calls for 8.7 Percent Increase for National Science Foundation Funding

III. Teaching Toolbox

• Monsters on the Move  — A slew of schools are preparing students to work in the computer-game industry.

IV. Fellowship Programs

• The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

I. Databytes

 Back to the index.

II. Congressional Hotline

Bush Proposes $143 Billion Federal Investment in R&D; Science and Technology Spending Declines for Fourth Straight Year

The FY 2008 Budget request contains substantial proposed increases for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the three agencies in Bush’s American Competitive Initiative, as well as increases for weapons and human spacecraft development. Funding for the rest of the federal R&D portfolio, however, declines in the President’s budget.

“The overall federal investment in R&D would increase to $143.0 billion, a 1.4 percent increase over the likely final total for the still-unfinished FY 2007 budget, but development funding would take up the entire increase and more. The federal investment in basic and applied research would fall 2.0 percent from the likely 2007 total to $55.4 billion in 2008 as gains in the ACI agencies would be more than offset by cuts in other agencies' research funding. In real terms, the federal research investment would fall for the fourth year in a row after peaking in 2004,” says Kei Koizumi of the AAAS.

House Science Committee Chair Bart Gordon (D-TN), responded to the budget proposal with the following: “While the President’s budget includes some important funding increases, it lacks the priorities and consistency to ensure our competitiveness now and in the long run.”

To see the AAAS Preliminary Analysis of R&D in the FY 2008 Budget, go here: http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/prel08p.htm

To read the entire statement from Representative Gordon, visit http://science.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1267

FY 2008 Budget Calls for 8.7 Percent Increase for National Science Foundation Funding 

Thanks to the President’s American Competitive Initiative (ACI), funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been proposed to increase 8.7 percent to $6.4 billion for 2008. Investment in NSF’s R&D would total a record-high of $4.9 billion, an increase of 8.3 percent, according to the AAAS.

 Proposed funding for the NSF Engineering Directorate, the single largest source of federal funding for university-based, fundamental engineering research is $683.3 million for FY 2008, an increase of $54.75 million, or 8.7 percent, over the President’s FY 2007 request. National Science Foundation funding for engineering accounts for approximately 42% of the total federal support in this area.  

The President proposes to continue to fund the highly successful NSF Math and Science Partnership program, which aims to improve K-12 science and math education. The 2008 request remains at the FY 2007 level of $46 million, but approximately $30 million of the request would provide for new awards. 

NSF has articulated a five-fold list of budget priorities: Discovery Research for Innovation, Preparing the Workforce of the 21^st Century, Transformational Facilities and Infrastructure, International Polar Year Leadership, and Stewardship. These priorities will function within NSF’s four strategic goals: Discovery, which will work to foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge; Learning, which will cultivate a world-class, broadly inclusive science and engineering workforce; Research Infrastructure, which will build the Nation’s research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyberinfrastructure, and experimental tools; and Stewardship, which will support excellence in science and engineering research and education.  

The five major investments for FY 2008 will be: 1) Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (proposed funding at $52 million); 2) Cyberinfrastructure (proposed funding at $644 million); 3) International Polar Year (proposed funding at $59 million); 4) National Nanotechnology Initiative (proposed funding at $390 million); and 5) Networking and Information Technology R&D (proposed funding at $994 million).  

For detailed information on the NSF’s budget request, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2008/index.jsp

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III. Teaching Toolbox

Monsters on the Move 

By Corinna Wu 

For many teens, playing video games is their No. 1 extracurricular activity. Yet it’s a pastime that’s unlikely to get listed on a college application … or is it? According to the Entertainment Software Association, Americans spent $7 billion on computer and video games in 2005—a take that rivals the annual Hollywood box office. Just as a kid might dream of studying filmmaking, music or theater, collegebound teenagers can now pursue a career designing and developing the very games that make up their favorite hobby.

In fact, the real difficulty for students who want a higher education in games might be deciding where to go. Dozens of technical schools and community colleges around the country offer certificate programs in computer game programming and development. Art schools cater to those interested in graphics and animation. Universities like Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech have offered master’s degrees in the field for a number of years, and students can pursue Ph.D.’s in the study of digital media. The DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash., accredited in 2002, devotes itself to training students for the video game industry.

Now, traditional four-year colleges are jumping on the bandwagon by adding bachelor’s degrees in computer game design to their course catalogues. This fall, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California began accepting students into their new programs. The University of Denver started its undergraduate program in fall 2005. And Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which offers a minor in game studies, is moving toward approving an undergraduate major in game and simulation arts and sciences.

These programs aim to prepare students for jobs in the game industry but also to give them a broad education. Graduates come out knowing how to code and with an appreciation of the artistic elements involved. “The difference is that they’re whole-brain educated,” says Scott Leutenegger, professor of computer science and director of the Game Development Program at the University of Denver. “They can do the creative art-and-design side, and they have the technical depth, which we have not watered down as computer scientists.”

It appears that many students are finding that left-brain/right-brain combination appealing. Though brand new, the programs are already attracting lots of interest. And that interest, says Leutenegger, comes none too soon. Nationally, student enrollments in computer science have dropped 70 percent over the past six years. The crash followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble and media reports about the outsourcing of high-tech jobs. “Parents and kids see computer science as a terrible career to go into,” he says.

But the IT industry is recovering, and the game industry in particular is expected to double in the next two years, meaning that available jobs will soon outnumber the qualified people to fill them. “This is going to be a huge problem for the entire IT industry starting in about two years, and certainly in three or four years,” Leutenegger says. In that context, using computer games to get kids interested in computer science is almost a no-brainer.

It’s Not All Fun and Games

The emphasis on games, however, isn’t just a gimmick to reel students into computer science departments. Games are the subject of serious research—in terms of their architecture, their potential applications and their cultural impact. For example, Michael Mateas, who was recruited from Georgia Tech to help build the computer game design major at UC Santa Cruz, developed a groundbreaking interactive drama called “Façade.” In the game, the player pays a visit to a couple that’s having marital problems, and the characters react in real time to whatever the player says or does. “Part of the point of this project was to offer a proof of concept that other forms of game play based purely on social interaction and story are possible,” Mateas says. He and his collaborator, Andrew Stern, had to create new programming languages and artificial intelligence techniques to make the game possible.

Teenagers aren’t the only gamers: The military uses games to train soldiers, governments use them to simulate disaster scenarios and business schools use them to teach economics. The modern world of gaming grew out of the idea of using simulations as a way to generate knowledge, Mateas says, where you build an artificial system, see what it does and study it as if it were a natural system. “Games are like simulations made playable,” he says.

Leutenegger sees serious or humane games like this eclipsing entertainment-based games within five years. Games have applications in medicine, where they can be used to distract burn victims from their pain or to help patients recover cognitively after a brain injury. Educational games teach children subjects like reading, math and geography and can even create social awareness. A group of students at the University of Denver created a game called “Squeezed,” which recently won a competition run by MTV. The goal of the game is to raise empathy for the issues faced by migrant farm workers.

Parents, who are often skeptical when they first hear about these degree programs, usually come to understand what they’re all about, Leutenegger says. He’s met with about a hundred prospective students and their parents, he says, and “only one of them slammed his fist down on the table and said ‘No games!’…The majority of them seem to get it—that this is a hard technology degree.”

In fact, the requirements for the computer game design majors are often tougher than those for a traditional computer science degree. At the University of Denver, students can pursue either a B.A. or a B.S. Students in the B.S. program complete all the requirements for the computer science major, a minor in mathematics and a minor in art or digital media studies. The B.A. students must double major in game development and either studio art, digital media studies or electronic media arts design.

Some universities offer more of a hybrid program, equally balanced between engineering and art, and some are pure design degrees. At UC Santa Cruz, they decided to weight the course load to the technical side, so students who ultimately don’t pursue jobs in the industry will still have a solid computer science background, says associate professor James Whitehead, who proposed the new major and ushered it through the approval process. In addition to classes in computer science and engineering, UC Santa Cruz students choose electives in art, film, music, theater and economics. In all, 10 departments are involved in the major. “Santa Cruz has a long history of being an interdisciplinary campus,” Mateas says, “and game design and development is inherently interdisciplinary.”

An important component of all the programs is to give students hands-on experience developing games. At USC, students take a year-long advanced game projects class, where each student proposes a game, the class votes on five they want to work on and they split into teams to build them. At the end of the first semester, the students demonstrate the games for industry representatives and get feedback on which ones to keep working on in the spring.

The students this fall proposed a diverse range of projects, says Michael Zyda, director of USC’s GamePipe Laboratory, including a music-based game called “Bushida Beat” and another that’s a takeoff of the movie “March of the Penguins.” It’s a first-person shooter game where the birds hurl snowballs at one another.

By working in teams, the students “learn to collaborate in cross-disciplinary groups and to build a large piece of software,” Zyda says, “and they’re basically industry-ready.” Zyda himself has real-world experience in game development; while at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., he and his colleagues created a popular game called America’s Army, which the U.S. military uses as a recruiting tool. 
In the commercial game industry, a design team can involve more than 100 people, each one a specialist responsible for a small part of the overall project. But ideally, these teams should have people who are more well-rounded, Mateas says. “Horror stories have been told to me about completely non-coding designers who, when proposing a game mechanic, have no concept of what’s an easy thing to do and what would be a 10-year research effort to figure out how to code up,” he says. “If you really don’t know anything about programming, then you don’t know where those edges are.” Schools like UC Santa Cruz are trying to educate people to become the kind of artist-programmers who can walk those edges without falling in.

The college programs receive support from companies such as Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Motorola, who know that the students they help nurture now may become employees in the near future. But even if graduates don’t go into the game industry, “the skills are directly transferable to any technology career,” Leutenegger says. “A lot of people work in the game industry for a few years, and then they switch and go work for Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft— whatever—because the skills they have are the ones that computer science graduates traditionally have also.”

In fact, they might even be considered the cream of the crop. Zyda says he received a query from the federal government about identifying students interested in getting advanced degrees in computer security. The government was unhappy with the quality of students with traditional computer science degrees and recognized that experience in game design resulted in stronger programmers. “If they’re not strong programmers, they change majors,” Zyda notes. “They can switch to something easier, like electrical engineering.”

Corinna Wu is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va.

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IV. Fellowship Programs

Postdoctoral

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.  This program is open to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents and offers a competitive stipend as well as insurance, relocation, and travel allowances.  The program offers one to three-year postdoctoral fellowships designed to increase the involvement of scientists and engineers from academia and industry to scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Navy.  The program has a rolling admission.  Go to: http://www.asee.org/resources/nrl/ .

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