FEBRUARY 2008
Providing interesting and useful information for engineering faculty. To subscribe click here.

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• Combine Graphical and Textual Programming with NI LabVIEW 8.5
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• Join the Autodesk Faculty Lounge
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• Heliocentris Fuel Cell Education Giveaway & Sale
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• NAE Announces Bernard Gordon Prize Winners!
  www.nae.edu/awards_g2
   

• Special Offer: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 Student Edition
  http://store.ptc.com/

 

Combine Graphical and Textual Programming with NI LabVIEW 8.5

Use National Instruments LabVIEW 8.5 software to apply algorithm engineering and reduce design time. With LabVIEW, you can combine different design methods and computation models for a hybrid approach to dynamic control systems. Design, prototype, and deploy systems with parallel computation processes automatically using LabVIEW and multicore technology.

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Heliocentris Fuel Cell Education Giveaway & Sale

Over 10 years & 10,000 clients later we still offer you the best quality solutions for fuel cell science education. Our fuel cell engineering products are designed to meet the needs of High Schools, Colleges, Universities and Research Facilities. Heliocentris products are designed for instruction, hands-on training, and application engineering.

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The National Academy of Engineering congratulates Dr. Jacquelyn F. Sullivan and Dr. Lawrence E. Carlson, winners of the 2008 Bernard M. Gordon Prize. 
Click to find out more...

Special Offer: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 Student Edition

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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.

In this Issue:

I. Databytes

• Chemical Engineering Degrees Awarded by School (Top 50), 2006

II. Congressional Hotline

• HOUSE AND SENATE STILL AT ODDS OVER FARM BILL
• HIGHER EDUCATION BILL DEADLINE PLACES PRESSURE ON HOUSE, SENATE NEGOTIATORS

III. Teaching Toolbox

• Knowledge Builders — With “electric pickles,” Space-Shuttle Tiles and other attention-grabbing stratagems, college and graduate students seek to inspire a young generation of potential engineers

IV.  JEE Selects

• Give Them a Reason to Learn ¬¬– Design offers a springboard to engineering and science

V. Fellowship Programs

• The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
• NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program
   

I. Databytes
 

Back to the index.

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3rd edition now available!

Engineering, Go For It! is a colorful, inspiring magazine designed to attract high school students, parents, and teachers to the exciting world of engineering and technology. Published bi-annually by ASEE, Engineering, Go For It! has reached over 1 million K-12 readers since 2003, introducing them to the full spectrum of engineering and technology career opportunities. Order your copy today!
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II. Congressional Hotline

HOUSE AND SENATE STILL AT ODDS OVER FARM BILL

The House and Senate Agriculture committee aren’t saying when they expect
to wrap up efforts to reconcile differences in the $280 billion, five-year farm bill. Meanwhile, the White House says both versions are too costly and that the president is ready whip out his veto pen if he thinks the final bill is too expensive. A new version of the House bill seeks to find savings by cutting crop subsidies, but that got farming groups and farm-state senators fuming. Another problem for both the House and White House: a $5 billion
agriculture disaster relief trust fund to assist farmers hit by droughts, floods or fire.


HIGHER EDUCATION BILL DEADLINE PLACES PRESSURE ON HOUSE,
SENATE NEGOTIATORS

Be aware of the Ides of March: Congress has only until mid-March to overhaul and pass the Higher Education Act, which covers aid to colleges, universities and students.  “Pre-conference” talks between staff members of the two bodies’ education committees have started in an effort to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions before the act expires. The two versions share some key financial disclosure goals. Both committees want to require schools to give students more information on loan rate terms and what the schools’ total costs are, and would stop lenders from giving schools money or perks in exchange for getting on a “preferred lender” list. Both bills also want to create a “price index” for higher education so students can compare annual tuition increases.

 Back to the index.

III. Teaching Toolbox

Knowledge Builders
By Barbara Mathias-Riegel

Anna Minakyan realizes “I had it in me” to become a mechanical engineer. As a child, she could take apart and reassemble a remote control device without difficulty. But when she was in high school, “no one came to teach us about engineering.”

Now a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Minakyan wants to make sure that future college students are exposed to more than the “basic science and basic math” she was taught. So five times a year, in a program sponsored by the Intel Foundation, she meets with a group of high school girls for one-hour, hands-on demonstrations. She is one of hundreds of engineering undergraduate and graduate students across the country who are mentoring students in middle and high schools.

Such school-college partnerships in engineering and science teaching are now getting a serious evaluation with a National Science Foundation review of its own nationwide K-12 program known as STEM (for science, technology, engineering and math), launched in 1999.

The NSF study won’t be completed for a couple of years. But if precise measurements are lacking, Minakyan’s and other college students’ experiences, as well as the accounts of professors and school principals, offer anecdotal evidence that the effort in grades 6 through 12 is making an impact.

In Minakyan’s case, the same group of girls keeps coming back for more, even though her class is not mandatory. “I feel like I’ve made a connection with them. They understand me and I understand them.” It’s not just the high school students who benefit. The demos—which take a considerable amount of time to prepare—help Minakyan stay more organized in her engineering studies, she says.

“When [teaching fellows] spend time with the students helping them understand engineering concepts, it really drives those concepts home, and the engineering students become much more comfortable with the material,” says Martha Cyr, director of K-12 outreach at Worcestor Polytechnic and a veteran of 14 years of working with elementary and secondary schools. “When they come back to the campus, it helps them to see how the concepts all fit.”

Following NSF’s lead

In the past year, NSF has funded approximately 144 K-12 projects in 46 states, and other institutes and associations are following the foundation’s lead. Among these are the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s (BWF) Student Science Enrichment Program supporting Duke’s Techtronics; the Intel Foundation at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), which supports GK-12 programs in some 70 student chapters nationally. Funds provided for teaching fellows range from $500 community service grants to $3,000 yearly stipends—a major incentive, especially for graduate students.

Since each university or college designs its own Grade 6-12 engineering program, classroom experiences vary widely, from the one-hour demos offered periodically by Minakyan to all-day labs several times a week. And teaching fellows explore creative ways to keep young students engaged.

At Rogers Herr Middle School in Durham, N.C., two graduate students from Duke University wrapped up a two-hour lesson on circuits and circuit components by electrifying a pickle. Wired clips were attached to either end. Once voltage was applied from a standard outlet, the pickle glowed yellow and gave off a strange burnt smell.

“Would you like to taste an electric pickle?” the middle-schoolers were asked, and most were game to try. University of Connecticut students have also visited schools toting what Amber Black, a materials science and mechanical engineering senior, calls their “road show,” featuring balloons, bouncing balls, superconductors, space shuttle tiles and pieces of foam mattresses.

Despite their variety, most of these programs share two overall goals, succinctly expressed by Paul Klenk, co-director of Techtronics, Duke University’s outreach for middle schools: “One is to ensure that all students know what engineering is when they graduate from high school; the second is to encourage students to pursue careers in engineering and help them get there.”

The outreach benefits all participants, says Klenk, a graduate of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering who has been involved in Techtronics since 2001: Young teens gain mentors to whom they can relate; middle school teachers learn more about engineering; and engineering students gain invaluable teaching and communication skills as they learn to describe complex concepts in terms that middle school students can understand.

Kantesh Balani, a graduate student in mechanical and materials engineering at the Florida International University (FIU), has worked with high school students over the past five years on full-day workshops, essay competitions, science experiments and presentations, including one called “Nanotechnology in Today’s World.” Recently, two of the high school students from Balani’s classes went on to summer internships at FIU. One student plans to remain on campus as an engineering undergrad; the other will go on to mechanical engineering at MIT.

“I feel very satisfied when a young student tells me, ‘I came to engineering just because of you,’” says Balani.

Social commitment, Yellow Shirts

Engineering students who sign up to teach teens commonly express the hope of attracting minorities and women to engineering. Another driving force has been concern about the environment. It is something they share in common with the younger students and are able to explore in exercises on energy conservation and recycling.

“Teaching the young also gives the engineering students a way to give back to the community,” says Cyr, of Worcester Polytechnic. That kind of social commitment is something that “is really in the conscience of this generation, that I don’t remember in my generation.”

Yet no one denies that this kind of outreach takes careful preparation. You can’t just plop an engineering student in the middle of a classroom of teenagers and expect immediate teaching success.

“Anyone who is teaching needs some sort of mentoring,” says Robert D. Shull, a materials scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As president of TMS, which has its own K-12 outreach program and gives awards to standout teaching fellows, Schull himself has nearly 20 years’ experience leading Saturday morning science workshops for young students.

“One of the things you learn is what works and what doesn’t work, such as how to keep the students busy at all times. If 10 children are waiting to use the equipment, that will kill the program right away. You have to be trained how to handle that sort of situation.”

Organizing and mentoring the teaching fellows requires extra hours of work by university and college faculty members, who must also meet with school teachers and principals and help undergraduates juggle class schedules to accommodate the off-campus teaching. Yet the degree of faculty involvement varies with each program. Oftentimes, the fellows find that their peers offer the most valuable instruction.

“I learned from my predecessor,” says Black, the University of Connecticut senior. “Now I teach anybody who is interested in doing outreach with us. I do this because I feel it’s one of the most important things we do. Next year we are starting an outreach class in the science department, an elective class on how to teach the demos.”

Discipline in the classroom is essential to the success of G6-12 outreach. When Lisa Burton and the other teaching fellows from Duke’s Techtronics program present their weekly two-and-a-half-hour engineering lesson at a local middle school, it follows the last class of the day—a time when many students are restless and tired. “Our biggest problem is behavior and keeping the students on task,” says Burton. “If the weather is nice, we try to do activities outside. For instance, we did a unit on rockets in the spring and the students tested their rockets outside as they were building them.” A middle school science teacher once observed to Burton that teaching fellows sometimes face difficulty asserting authority, in part because many are the same age as the students’ brothers, sisters and cousins.

“However, our biggest weakness is also our biggest strength,” says Burton. “It is much easier to relate to these students because we were in middle school not too long ago. I remember what I was interested in and what I did and did not like to do when I was their age.”

Perhaps the keenest observers of whether G6-12 outreach is working are the school principals. For four years, Deirdre Pilch, former principal of Centaurus High School in LaFayette, Colorado, kept careful watch on the results of her school’s partnership with the college of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Now an assistant superintendent in the school system, Pilch liked what she saw, including graduate students who were able to speak Spanish with Latino high-schoolers.

The university’s graduate engineering students come into Centaurus’ labs and classrooms several times a week as a regular part of the school day. On both the CU and Centaurus campuses, these teaching fellows wear yellow shirts emblazoned with their group name and motto: “TEAMS” (Tomorrow’s Engineers . . . creAte . . . iMagine . . . Succeed.).

Pilch calls the CU teaching fellows “the field experts,” noting that, “they bring in the most recent research and technology and the most recent projects that are around that kind of work. They have become tremendous resources in terms of helping my classroom teachers to take it into the practical world.”

 Back to the index.


IV. JEE Selects

Give Them a Reason to Learn

By Matthew Mehalik, Yaron Doppelt and Christian Schunn

There is a clear need to increase interest in engineering and science careers among young students. What if a solution came from tried-and-true practices engineers currently use everyday? What if this same solution not only created more interest but also helped them become better students by more successfully learning technical and scientific content? These are questions that engineering faculty and learning scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have been exploring over the past five years. Their efforts show the exciting challenges and payoffs that come from using engineering design as a way to teach science concepts for middle and high school students.

The research involves understanding what prevents young people from relating to science and then creating a curriculum that removes these barriers. Researchers study the modes of thought and expression of young people as they and their teachers interact over their curriculum.

The researchers collaborated with science teachers and district experts to create units that immerse students in six-to-eight-week design projects. The units began with having students articulate their own needs for a design. Eventually, they built prototypes that met these needs. The researchers discovered that one of the biggest barriers students face in learning science topics is that they usually do not have ideas about why they need to learn most science topics. (“Why do I need to know about Ohm’s Law? I don’t build circuits at home.”) Instead, students think about why they might need an alarm system. (“To keep my little brother out of my room.”) Then, they design and build that alarm system using common sets of materials for prototypes.

Each immersion topic was carefully chosen so that, no matter what need a student articulated, the final design required wrestling with key science principles in order for the students to get their prototype to work. For the alarm system module, students learned about current, voltage, resistance, parallel and series circuits, detectors and sensors, light-emitting diodes and different types of sound buzzers. In more recent work involving a module in high school chemistry, students designed different heating and cooling systems using different types of containers and chemicals to learn about stoichiometry, exothermic and endothermic reactions and single and double replacement reactions. Their designs began with meeting such needs as warming hands in the winter or keeping drinks cold with a sleeve in the summer.

School budgets and grant funding allowed less than $10.00 per student for each module. State standards and district curriculum requirements had to be addressed. The modules needed to strategically cover topics that the current curricula did not cover adequately. Most districts have little flexibility in their curricula. The team also helped teachers adjust their teaching style: Instead of lecturing and providing answers, the team emphasized guiding students in testing their ideas and learning from the results how to make their designs work better.

The project has produced some surprising findings: Compared with a hands-on science curriculum, students learned science concepts better using an engineering design approach. It was possible to introduce the design approach without requiring large shifts in existing curricula. The change did not require huge amounts of resources for materials or teacher training. In addition, students learned what it is like to solve a design problem the way an engineer would.

The researchers believe that design allows students to think in many different modes flexibly, from creatively coming up with many different solutions, to analyzing them, evaluating them, and seeking to understand the physical phenomena that differentiates more effective solutions from less effective solutions. Ultimately, the design process allows students to build and express their own meaning in a process that integrates science and engineering design knowledge, and that unlocks their interest and engagement.

Matthew M. Mehalik is an adjunct faculty member, Freshman Programs, School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh. Yaron Doppelt is an instructor at the Yemin Orde Science Center and Braude College, Israel. Christian Schunn is a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center and associate professor of psychology at Pitt. This article is adapted from “Middle-School Science Through Design-Based Learning versus Scripted Inquiry: Better Overall Science Concept Learning and Equity Gap Reduction,” written for the Journal of Engineering Education.

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V. Fellowship/Scholarship 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/nrl/ .

Undergraduate/Graduate Fellowship

NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program. The purpose is to meet the continuing needs of the nation's aeronautics and space effort by increasing the number of highly trained scientists and engineers in aeronautics and related disciplines. Scholarships awarded include competitive stipend payments anticipated amount for undergrad up to $15,000 and up to $35,000 for graduate. There is an option to attend a summer internship (up to $10,000 per summer) at a participating NASA Research Center. The undergraduate program is open to U.S. citizens, applicants should have completed their sophomore year of college by Fall of 2008, and should be in good standing at an accredited college or university. The graduate program is open to U.S. citizens, the applicants should be be accepted or enrolled in an accredited program, and remain in good academic standing at their respected college or university. Website and online application will be open in mid-December, 2007. For more information, contact nasa.asp@asee.org

Scholarships

SAE Scholarship:

Through generous contributions from various corporations and universities, SAE is proud to award scholarship money to both undergraduate and graduate engineering students. SAE scholarships assist in developing the future engineering workforce by helping students achieve their dreams of becoming an engineer. Funded through the SAE Foundation, these scholarships encourage academic excellence and help students around the world to pursue their passion for engineering.

URL Link: http://students.sae.org/awdscholar/scholarships/