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| May 2009 | Subscribe |
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In This Issue:
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I. Databytes |
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Other data trends can be viewed at www.asee.org/colleges. |
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III. Teaching Toolbox |
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Capstone RedesignEducators are borrowing from other disciplines -- and nature -- to rethink a staple of undergraduate engineering By Mary Lord From the elegant arcs of the Golden Gate Bridge to an arrow’s soaring flight, all things great and small represent triumphs of design. This signature activity spans fields as diverse as biomechanics and industrial engineering and makes capstone design courses an undergraduate staple. Yet many design experiences narrowly concentrate on a mechanical, electrical, or other department-specific project rather than fostering the multi-disciplinary teamwork typical of industry. A new report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching urges undergraduate engineering programs to overhaul their “jam-packed curriculum focused on technical knowledge” and offer more practice-like experiences — the engineering equivalent of clinical rotations for medical students — to help students become creative thinkers who can see, not just solve, problems. Some pioneering design-course instructors are doing just that. With an assist from the National Science Foundation, they are identifying common elements across engineering disciplines and forging collaborations with architecture, cognitive science, and even the liberal arts. Their aim: figure out how engineers move from inspiration to innovation to product, then retool the design experience accordingly. Explains Jonathan Cagan, professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an authority on breakthrough product design: “We’re trying to rethink the whole way engineering design is taught.” Here are some examples. From modeling to sellingAlan Cheville, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, reconfigured the capstone electrical engineering design course around analysis, communications, and other “soft” skills. Engineers, he notes, must learn how to manufacture prototypes, meet deadlines, analyze data, validate results, and “sell” concepts. Cheville broke the design process into five phases, from researching a problem through modeling, fabrication, testing, and communicating results. He then developed new units to hone the skills real-world engineers need. Students choose specialties and become their team’s go-to “experts”; for instance, someone who enjoys handiwork can opt to be the team’s circuit-board builder, while another is responsible for measurement. Students must win approval for proposed designs and “market” their finished product in a written or Web-based sales pitch. The wrap-up is a three-page reflection on whether they liked their team role and the course’s impact on career choices. Incorporate “breathers”How do engineers arrive at that “aha!” moment that breaks through obstacles and leads to ingenious solutions? To find out, Carnegie Mellon’s Cagan, co-author of The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products, and his student Ian Tseng teamed up with cognitive psychologists Ken Kotovsky and Jarrod Moss to examine ways to stimulate creativity. Focusing on the early stages of the design process, they gave students a list of common items, such as a roll of tape, matches, and a ladder, with instructions to identify ways to use the items to create time-keeping devices. The open-ended assignment required students to brainstorm and conceptualize what a client or consumer might really want. The investigators then studied two different student approaches. One group read snippets of information about tape decks and heart-rate monitors before starting. Another group jumped in unprepared, but then took a break to read those same descriptions. The latter group came up with significantly more functionally distinct designs and far-reaching devices, leading Cagan to include information-gathering breaks in his graduate design course. “When you have an open goal,” explains Cagan, “it’s infinitely more useful to get information after starting to solve the problem.” Even seemingly tangential reading can produce useful information. Look to NatureNature abounds with design insights. Think of the gravity-defying gecko scooting up a sheer windowpane or the Velcro-like huckleberry burr. Or the puffer fish, which halts predators by inflating. Airbags have a similar function. “You can find organisms, systems, or ecologies that can inspire you directly,” says Missouri University of Science and Technology professor of interdisciplinary engineering Rob Stone. Trouble is, “most engineers don’t have a very good biology background” and thus can’t identify analogous functions, a concept known as biomimetics, that would let them make imaginative leaps. Rather than trying to cram a bio lab into the curriculum, Stone created a Cliff Notes version for a graduate course: a searchable thesaurus that translates engineering terminology into its equivalent function in biology. He is now incorporating biomimetics and the thesaurus into a senior design course. Integrate disciplines campus-wideTim Simpson, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Pennsylvania State University, believes an interdisciplinary approach to design is critical, since few products fall neatly into mechanical, electrical, or other domains. Key to this approach is a common vocabulary that can be shared among multiple disciplines. Simpson already encourages cross-fertilization among various engineering disciplines with an integrated design lab called the Learning Factory. He sees the results in the senior design course, where students know whom to ask for information rather than making it up or rushing to Wikipedia. Recently, Penn State unveiled a junior-year design course in mechanical engineering to expose students to tools and theories they will need for their capstone projects. But Simpson believes the approach can be broadened further. With NSF funding, he is holding workshops that include architects, psychologists, and liberal-arts faculty, along with engineers, who share a passion for design. “When you strip away the application, we found people were talking about the same thing,” reports Simpson. He now hopes to foster campus-wide collaborations, joining mechanical engineers, say, with students from kinesiology, business, and sports rehab to design products to prevent knee injuries in female athletes. Go with the flowCould nature hold a universal approach to all design problems, regardless of discipline? Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, and Sylvie Lorente, professor of civil engineering at the University of Toulouse, think so and have developed textbooks and interdisciplinary design courses around it. At its core is “flow.” Sap rising to lofty branches and bronchial tubes delivering oxygen to the blood share the concept of flow. So does the Atlanta airport, among the world’s most efficient, with a trunk-and-branch layout that echoes a tree’s vascular system. The rules for optimal efficiency, contends Bejan, can be expressed in a few simple designs. His novel lens, which Bejan calls “constructal theory,” does not copy from nature as much as it analyzes and predicts designs from the natural world. It sets forth design principles that minimize the impact of flaws or impediments, he argues — whether the flow in question is stresses in a skyscraper or heat from a microcircuit. While constructal theory has yet to gain wide acceptance, it has ignited imaginations in an undergraduate design course that Bejan developed with Lorente. One recent class reacted to US Airways Flight 1529’s dramatic ditching in the Hudson River by debating how airplane floors could be re-designed to ease emergency escapes. For their final project, students must write and defend a term paper about a big “flow” idea. One military history buff applied the theory to the movements and configurations of winning armies from the Battle of Marathon to the Napoleonic wars. Efforts to overhaul engineering design courses face inevitable hurdles. Chief among them: giving instructors the time and freedom to collaborate. “It’s not that we don’t want to do it,” notes Penn State’s Simpson. “But I have four courses I have to teach each year. That’s what I’m evaluated on and paid for and expected to deliver.” Lab space is another challenge. So is culture. When members of an interdisciplinary team showed up to pitch product ideas to their sponsor, the business students wore suits, the engineering majors, T-shirts and shorts. Perhaps the biggest hurdle, however, is a way of thinking that innovation requires, one that deals with ambiguity and reaches beyond the technical specifics students are taught and tested on. For engineering educators, changing that dynamic may be the ultimate design challenge. |
IV. JEE SELECTS |
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Help Her Believe in HerselfBy Barbara Bogue and Rose Marra Janelle, an A student, is assured by teachers that she has what it takes to be an engineer. Although uncertain, she decides to go for it. But in her first engineering course, all the guys seem to know more than she, especially when it comes to using equipment. Her TA expresses surprise that she is not more adept. The result? Even though Janelle is still intrigued by engineering, she’s worried about her ability to succeed and thinking of changing majors. Research shows that if a student believes that she can succeed, she is more likely to. In Janelle’s case, she was initially bolstered by encouragement from others, not by her own belief in her ability to succeed in engineering. Any faith she had in her ability began to crumble when she encountered roadblocks. It is this individual belief, or lack of belief, in one’s ability to take the required actions to achieve a specific outcome that is self-efficacy. Growth in self-efficacy requires that students be able to reflect on what they have accomplished and be able to project their success or failures on their future performance. A growing body of research supports the notion that low self-efficacy discourages students from persisting in engineering. Our recent research substantiates this, but delivers a complex message. Using the LAESE (Longitudinal Assessment of Engineering Self-Efficacy instrument, from AWE, Assessing Women and Men in Engineering), we followed 196 women studying engineering for two years at five U.S. institutions. We measured responses on several subscales, or sets of questions, related to self-efficacy. The good news is that we found positive, significant changes from the first to second years in coping skills and in self-efficacy and students’ expectations of success in math. On the downside, women showed a significant decrease in feelings of inclusion, or feelings of belonging in engineering — an important contributor to self-efficacy and, in turn, persistence in engineering. Our data also suggested that this is particularly true for minority students. Other research shows that peer relationships, educational strategies, and social climate may all contribute to an unwelcoming atmosphere. Our study reinforced earlier findings that self-efficacy is related to women students’ plans to remain in this predominately male discipline. In fact, the stronger the sense of engineering efficacy, the more positive are the plans of all students to complete engineering studies. How can engineering educators use this information? If we are concerned about attracting more people into engineering, it is critical to understand the value of supporting students’ internal conviction that engineering is a worthy goal and that they have the ability to achieve it. Too many practices — weeding out, assuming a natural talent or brilliance is necessary, put-down humor, insensitivity to diversity, non-inclusive classroom environments — undermine students’ engineering self-efficacy. Because women are often already marginalized in engineering, the negative impact of these behaviors is magnified. We also must understand that self-efficacy differs from self-confidence. Self-efficacy is situational — the belief in the ability to succeed in a specific domain or task. Confidence is more generalized; a student may believe she “can succeed in anything,” but still not believe she can succeed in engineering. Your students may appear and profess to be very confident without having a strong sense of engineering efficacy. This makes it easy to miss signs that a student’s belief in her ability to succeed in engineering is diminishing, resulting in the loss of talented students. As faculty members, we should examine which of our practices undermine students’ belief in their ability to succeed, and create environments that support student success — in the classroom and in extra-curricular activities. One way is through academic success seminars aimed at developing feelings of inclusion. When students express self-doubt, we must take the time to assure them they can succeed. We need to dispel the notion that only brilliant students become engineers by offering diverse examples of success stories. Barbara Bogue is an associate professor of engineering science and mechanics and women in engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Rose Marra is an associate professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri. This article is excerpted from “Women Engineering Students and Self-Efficacy: A Multi-Year, Multi-Institution Study of Women Engineering Student Self-Efficacy” in the January 2009 Journal of Engineering Education. Research was supported by National Science Foundation grant HRD-0120642. |
V. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
Job-hunting? Here are a few current openings: 1. Associate Dean -- 2 opportunities Visit here for details:
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VI. COMING ATTRACTIONS |
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VII. ASEE Partners with WEPAN |
ASEE Partners with Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN) on New Online Knowledge Center WEPAN has launched its new Knowledge Center at wepanknowledgecenter.org. This is a community-wide effort to collect, organize, and bring visibility to a range of available resources. The center is also intended to increase the number, scope and effectiveness of initiatives that address recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in engineering. WEPAN has integrated ASEE's data mining tool, the Engineering Data Management System, and is looking forward to further ASEE member participation and support. 
The WEPAN Knowledge Center offers:
For more information, please visit: wepanknowledgecenter.org |
VIII. ASEE K-12 Workshop |
ASEE´s 6th Annual Workshop on K-12 Engineering Education, presented by Dassault Systemes, will be held on Saturday, June 13 in Austin, TX. This day-long event is designed to introduce ASEE members and more than 200 Austin-area teachers and engineering educators from across the country to innovative, effective engineering education resources designed for the K-12 classroom. The workshop will provide participants with hands-on opportunities through interactive workshop sessions to learn how to implement K-12 engineering education activities in the classroom. For more information, including details on proposal submissions and workshop registration, please visit: www.engineeringk12.org/k12workshop |
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