The Right Time at the Right Places.

Our introductory electrical engineering courses still have high attrition rates which raises the question of how to identify students who may be at risk of failing or withdrawing from engineering courses and programs. We have experimented with two different approaches: one is to develop tests that are deployed early in student engineering coursework, and another is to measure student success in prior math courses. Math preparation is the basis of two of the tests, with one also including logic and algorithmic thinking. Preliminary results indicate that purely math-based tests did not correlate well with success in either an introductory problem-solving and programming course, or a sophomore circuits course. A test that includes logic and algorithmic thinking correlated better, but not as well as prior math GPA. All methods currently suffer from large scatter and relatively small correlation factors.

An experimental teaching strategy was employed in a three-quarter introductory Electrical Engineering course. The system was designed to combine the best features of PSI (Proctoral System of Instruction, also known as the Keller Method) and the conventional system, in the context of engineering education. The most important feature is that it allows students to master every assigned problem and rewards them for that mastery. It was found that a very high percentage of students will take advantage of this opportunity. The percentage of students successfully completing the course was high-73%. The experiment was an exploratory one; no control group was employed. Therefore, the net pedagogical impact is not known. But it is known that the system is highly liked by students and is very good for morale.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Enhancing the Learning Experience in a Multidisciplinary Engineering Technology Course Abstract Rapidly changing technology advances demand the revisions of engineering and technology courses so that they continue to serve students and industry in a relevant way. In a typical engineering technology department, students from different majors are usually required to take an introductory electrical engineering course. Due to the multidisciplinary background of students, such a course has traditionally been a challenge to teach so as to make it interesting and useful to all students. Therefore innovative teaching methods have to be employed in order to accommodate different backgrounds and learning styles. In our department, a basic electrical engineering course is offered for sophomore students majoring in mechanical and electrical engineering technology. The course is usually taught in the fall and is meant to be an introductory course for EET students but also serves as a survey of electrical engineering for MET students. Because of this duality, the course has to be carefully designed, especially the laboratory component, to keep students interested and engaged throughout the semester. Topics covered include dc and ac circuits, Wheatstone bridge, electric machines, resonance circuits, RLC transient response, basic operation of electronics and digital circuits including diodes, transistors, power supplies, amplifiers, and logic gates. In this paper, we describe our experience teaching the course and how the redesign of the laboratory component has greatly enhanced the student learning experience independently of their majors of studies. Results showed that activities relating concepts to real world applications were more appealing. For instance, students enjoyed performing experiments involving the use of transducers such as strain gauges. Assessments results to meet certain accreditation criteria including direct and indirect measurements are also discussed with emphasis on the successes and lessons learned from the implementation process. Introduction Engineering and Technology education faces significant challenges in its attempt to meet the demands of the engineering profession in the 21st century. The rapid changing in technology necessitates the revisions of topics taught so that they continue to serve students and industry in a pertinent way. During the last decade many articles have been published1,2,3 calling for reform and proposing new methods for undergraduate engineering education including improvements of the classroom environment, and asserting the desire to attract and retain a diverse student body. In a typical ET department, students from different majors are usually required to take an introductory electricity course. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, such a course has traditionally been a challenge to teach and therefore innovative teaching methods have to be employed. In our department, this course is called “Electrical Devices & Measurements” and offered mostly to Mechanical (MET) and Electrical (EET) Engineering Technology students, in addition to others who can take it as an elective course in their major of studies. Therefore students taking this

Contribution: This article discusses instructor decisions that support social capital development in an online, asynchronous, team-based introduction to electrical engineering course. Background: Online learning is changing how instructors and students interact with each other and course materials. There is a need to understand how to support students’ social capital development during online engineering courses. Research Questions: What aspects of an online, asynchronous, team-based, introductory electrical engineering course gave students instrumental and expressive social capital? What decisions did the instructor make to support the development of strong and weak social ties? Methodology: A case study approach was used to analyze interview data from the students, instructor, and graduate teaching assistant (TA) from an online course. Findings: The results indicate effective lecture delivery and a team-based format can provide students with instrumental social supports they need to meet learning objectives in an online asynchronous, introduction to electrical engineering course. To facilitate the development of expressive support and stronger ties, instructors should incorporate these goals in their course design decisions.

Students at the very first electrical engineering course begin to get acquainted with the bare basic material in the field. Thus, solving a circuit, aside from a small resistive circuit, is more than impossible. Fortunately, students have access to simulators like SPICE which can help them solve more complex circuits to observe the behaviour under different excitation inputs. This work describes a software interface that helps one to use a SPICE simulator without having any knowledge about the simulator syntax and requiring no previous training on the interface. >

For students, the entering phase of courses is of major importance for their further studies. Therefore the target should be to set up their first semester in a student and competence centered manner. This challenge is met in implementing innovative teaching interventions, and the course “Electrical Engineering” is be presented as an example. The quality circle from an analysis of the status quo until the final competence based evaluation via intervention development and implementation is to be presented.

This paper provides an empirically informed perspective on the notion of responsibility using an ethical framework that has received little attention in the engineering-related literature to date: ethics of care. In this work, we ground conceptual explorations of engineering responsibility in empirical findings from engineering student's writing on the human health and environmental impacts of "backyard" electronic waste recycling/disposal. Our findings, from a purposefully diverse sample of engineering students in an introductory electrical engineering course, indicate that most of these engineers of tomorrow associated engineers with responsibility for the electronic waste (e-waste) problem in some way. However, a number of responses suggested attempts to deflect responsibility away from engineers towards, for example, the government or the companies for whom engineers work. Still other students associated both engineers and non-engineers with responsibility, demonstrating the distributed/collective nature of responsibility that will be required to achieve a solution to the global problem of excessive e-waste. Building upon one element of a framework for care ethics adopted from the wider literature, these empirical findings are used to facilitate a preliminary, conceptual exploration of care-ethical responsibility within the context of engineering and e-waste recycling/disposal. The objective of this exploration is to provide a first step toward understanding how care-ethical responsibility applies to engineering. We also hope to seed dialogue within the engineering community about its ethical responsibilities on the issue. We conclude the paper with a discussion of its implications for engineering education and engineering ethics that suggests changes for educational policy and the practice of engineering.

1 Abstract A typical four-year engineering curriculum is chock-full of courses, concepts, and ideas. However, four years is simply not enough time to explore the vast landscape of engineering knowledge thoroughly. Thus trade-offs are made selecting material within a course as well as selecting courses within a curriculum. One of these trade-offs is depth versus breadth. At the extremes, the specialist is too narrow while the generalist is too shallow. Most curricula locate themselves between these two poles, with general engineering programs leaning somewhat towards breadth. One might think that students who choose general programs would be appreciative of the breadth of the curriculum. However, even here some students object to required courses that are not immediately and obviously applicable to their anticipated career path. How can we convince students that breadth is just as important, if not more so, than depth? As a case study, I describe my approach in an introductory electrical engineering course that is taught to students interested in a variety of engineering disciplines – many of whom are not necessarily interested in electrical engineering per se. Using a variety of pedagogical and curricular techniques, I dispel a number of myths related to the breadth versus depth debate.

This paper describes the development, pilot offering and initial assessment of a first year composition course, Essentials of College Rhetoric, specifically designed to provide students entering engineering programs at Texas Tech University (USA) with the critical reading and writing skills and rhetorical strategies traditionally taught in first year composition. However, this course differs from traditional composition courses in that it shares curriculum and assignments with the introductory electrical engineering course, Introduction to Engineering and Computer Programming, and not only underscores the role of engineers as writers in the workplace by teaching documentation conventions common to engineering practice, but also requires students to think and write critically about ethical, political, and other issues that shape the role of engineering in our culture.

Mechatronics refers to the interplay between mechanical and electrical principles that apply to a growing number of industrial products and processes. Despite the importance of this interdisciplinary area, many of today’s engineering graduates are unprepared to function competently in environments that require them to integrate electrical and mechanical knowledge areas. In addition, engineers with better communication and teamwork skills are needed to ensure U.S. competitiveness in today’s global economy. In order to address this competency gap a team of faculty members (consisting of faculty from both ME and EE departments) started work in the mid-nineties to integrate mechatronics-based activities at all levels of the undergraduate engineering curriculum at University of Detroit Mercy. These included a new senior level technical elective in introductory mechatronics along with mechatronic activities in freshmen design and in the introductory electrical engineering course meant for non-EE majors. This effort has been very successful, and now mechatronics activities are also going on in many pre-college programs that the school runs. Recently this team received a National Science Foundation grant to take this effort one step further by developing two new advanced courses in the area of modeling and simulation of mechatronic systems and in the area of sensors and actuators, including emerging technologies. One of the key components of this effort is a detailed plan for outcomes assessment. An outcomes assessment expert is also part of the team just as in our earlier efforts. The first of the two courses will be taught for the first time in January 2005. This paper describes in detail the technical content of the planned course as well as the assessment plan for the course. Introduction Mechatronics is defined as the synergistic combination of precision mechanical engineering, electronic control, and intelligent software in a systems framework, used in the design of products and manufacturing processes. Design of modern day products involves the knowledge of different engineering disciplines, an ability to communicate well, and work well in multidisciplinary teams. Because engineers are traditionally trained in fields such as either

This paper presents an integration of a loosely defined design project in an introductory electrical engineering course. The proposed project aims to introduce first-year engineering students to the world of electrical engineering and develop their general engineering skills. Because of its innovative and unconventional nature, a Rube Goldberg machine has been used as the project vehicle. In the project, students have been asked to design the machine with electrical sensors and actuators. Connected learning and assessment activities have been designed to engage students in deep understanding. Students thought the project was challenging, and could develop their technical skills and creativity.

In an effort to improve the learning experience of sophomore electrical engineering students, innovative lab exercises have been developed at Western New England College. The traditional lab experiments utilize passive and active elements in prescribed manners to teach students fundamental concepts. The concepts range from simple voltage division to high-order active filter circuits. This paper describes innovations in the laboratory portion of a two-semester introductory electrical engineering course. The new experiments introduce students to design with light and temperature sensors, motors, tachometers, and music equalizers. Projects include open-ended design with passive and active circuits. Furthermore, the projects are designed to enhance the students' ability to achieve ABET outcomes C (design for realistic constraints) and I (life-long learning). In the project and lab reports, students are required to address the aspects of cost, sustainability, manufacturability, environmental impact, and safety. The laboratory experiments and projects are described in this paper along with the assessment of those projects.

Ways in which spreadsheet programs can be used to introduce practical considerations in introductory electrical engineering courses are discussed. Examples are presented which show that spreadsheets can be used to predict and/or minimize the errors due to loading, the availability of only standard resistor values, and resistor tolerances. The circuits considered in these examples were selected to be as simple as possible. These examples could be used in the first semester of sophomore credits. They illustrate trade-offs, performance criteria, and nonunique solutions, and are intended to illustrate the power of spreadsheet programs. In the first example, a macro is used to implement a simple iterative optimization procedure. In the second example, minimization is done by exhaustive search using the table lookup capabilities of the spreadsheet. In the final example, the spreadsheet's random number generator is used to perform a Monte Carlo analysis. >

Contribution: Prior studies on goal congruity show that students are more motivated to pursue careers that allow them to work with and help others and give back to their community (i.e., careers that afford prosocial value). This paper discovers this same pattern in electrical engineering (EE) and discovers that prosocial affordance beliefs are significantly associated with intensions to persist, while agency beliefs are not. Background: Goal congruity theory finds that people are more motivated to pursue a career if it aligns with values they endorse. This theory can shed light on why some students do not persist in EE because of the stereotype that the profession does not allow working with and helping others. Research Questions: This paper seeks to answer whether EE students perceive the profession as affording prosocial value, and to test associations between prosocial perceptions and motivation to persist in the field. Methodology: The first study in this paper was conducted on students in an introductory EE course ( $n\,\,= 79$ ) that measured affordance beliefs about the EE profession and tested associations with intensions to persist. The second study compared affordance beliefs and trait endorsements held by students in the introductory level course with those in an advanced EE courses ( $n\,\,=51$ ). Findings: Mediation analysis revealed that the more novice students believe that EE allows them to fulfill prosocial goals, the greater their persistence intentions (95% CI: 0.01 to 0.34). This analysis also showed that agency beliefs were not strongly associated with persistence intensions.

Many engineering courses are transitioning from traditional paper textbooks to online and multimedia instructional modules to present content to students outside of class time. As the use of these online resources expands, research about the effective use and production of these resources should grow in tandem. We study the effect of three different educational interventions: expandable worked examples, assertion headings, and hand-drawn figures on students' learning and affective responses in online instructional texts for an introductory electrical engineering course. Although measures of students' performance on technical content showed few significant changes, affective measures of student course satisfaction with the materials had improved.