First-year Engineering Students Research Articles

DESIGN-BUILD PROJECT APPROACH IN A FIRST YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

We found that first-year engineering students often have difficulties to visualize and manipulate three-dimensional objects mentally, especially if the assembly involves multiple parts that need to work together in sequence to produce a required function. Ultimately, this lack of ability leads to poor representation of intended students’ design concepts in paper sketches, as well as poor or unacceptable detailed designs in CAD. Therefore, it is imperative that students develop their ability to manipulate complex objects in space very early in their academic careers. In this context, this paper focuses on the introduction and implementation of a challenging design-build project in the first-year engineering design course at UOIT intended to provide students with early opportunities to physically realize the spatial relationships and the three dimensional causality of the interaction of moving parts in an assembly.

An Analysis of Learning Styles for Implementing Learning Strategies of First-year Engineering Students

An Analysis of Learning Styles for Implementing Learning Strategies of First-year Engineering Students

First-Year Engineering Students’ Portrayal of Engineering in a Proposed Museum Exhibit for Middle School Students

Students’ perceptions of engineering have been documented through studies involving interviews, surveys, and word associations that take a direct approach to asking students about various aspects of their understanding of engineering. Research on perceptions of engineering rarely focuses on how students would portray engineering to others. First-year engineering student teams proposed a museum exhibit, targeted to middle school students, to explore the question “What is engineering?” The proposals took the form of a poster. The overarching research question focuses on how these students would portray engineering to middle school students as seen through their museum exhibit proposals. A preliminary analysis was done on 357 posters to determine the overall engineering themes for the proposed museum exhibits. Forty of these posters were selected and, using open coding, more thoroughly analyzed to learn what artifacts/objects, concepts, and skills student teams associate with engineering. These posters were also analyzed to determine if there were any differences by gender composition of the student teams. Building, designing, and teamwork are skills the first-year engineering students link to engineering. Regarding artifacts, students mentioned those related to transportation and structures most often. All-male teams were more likely to focus on the idea of space and to mention teamwork and designing as engineering skills; equal-gender teams were more likely to focus on the multidisciplinary aspect of engineering. This analysis of student teams’ proposals provides baseline data, positioning instructors to develop and assess instructional interventions that stretch students’ self-exploration of engineering.

Understanding the difficulties faced by engineering undergraduates in learning mathematical modelling

The teaching of mathematics in Singapore continues, in most cases, to follow a traditional model. While this traditional approach has many advantages, it does not always adequately prepare students for University-level mathematics, especially applied mathematics. In particular, it does not cultivate the ability to deal with non-routine problems, which is an essential virtue for any practitioner of mathematical modelling (MM). Here, we argue that this inability to handle non-routine problems is the principal reason for the serious difficulties experienced by Singaporean students who encounter MM at the tertiary level in Singapore universities. A survey was conducted, primarily to understand the difficulties facing the preliminary batch of first-year undergraduate engineering students doing a course in MM using differential equations (DEs) and linear algebra. Our work is motivated by concerns that the novelty of this course in the Singaporean context could lead to difficulties for these students. Students' abilities in attempting novel modelling-type problems, the techniques they employ in solving such problems, their comments on the course and expectations of their lecturers and tutors are being probed. We present our analyses of the survey results and discuss the implications for future work.

Relating Learning Strategies, Self-Esteem, Intellectual Functioning with Academic Achievement among First-Year Engineering Students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between learning strategies, self-esteem, intellectual functioning and academic achievement among first-year engineering students in South Africa. The current study also intended to determine which variables would contribute significantly to academic achievement. Four measures (Learning and Study Strategies Inventory, Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory, Organiser, and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices) were administered to 111 students. The students' final examination results served as a measure of academic achievement. Modest but significant correlations were found between self-esteem, learning strategies, Organiser, and academic achievement. Results further revealed Attitude, Freedom from Anxiety, Test Strategies, and Organiser as significant contributors to academic achievement. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

Team-Based Design Method Teaching Using Product Dissection and Design Metrics

The use of design methods in industry is established as an effective way of measuring and monitoring the performance of designs from the very early stages of integrated product development. Design teaching practices in undergraduate courses would benefit from more widespread adoption of such approaches, providing the necessary experience in design method use, their subjectivity, application strategies and domains, and the importance of design metrics for justification of redesign opportunities. This paper discusses the motivations, development and delivery of a new team-based exercise in design for manufacture and assembly, aimed at first-year mechanical engineering students, and facilitated by product dissection and the use of design methods. Selected results from the exercise are presented, together with reflections on the interaction and engagement of the students with the exercise and the design method.

Challenges for information literacy education at a university of technology

The article reports on an action research project to investigate the effectiveness of an information literacy intervention for first-year engineering students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The intervention consisted of two workshops which aimed at teaching the students to find information relevant to their essays via the university’s online public access catalogue (OPAC) and engineering databases and to reference and cite their sources. The project assessed students’ information skills before and after the two workshops with the use of a questionnaire consisting of a set of questions based on some of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) standards. The research provides insight into how information literacy education at CPUT library can be improved. Its major recommendations are that more periods in the timetable must be allocated to information literacy education and that lecturers should recognise the educational role of librarians.

A Variety of Approaches to the Provision of Mathematics Help for First-Year Engineering Undergraduates

Loughborough University offers mathematical support to its students in a variety of different ways. This paper details four initiatives, implemented during the academic years from 2003/2004 to 2008/2009, which were targeted at first-year engineering students with either non-traditional mathematical backgrounds or identified as having significant gaps in their mathematical knowledge. The four initiatives are: a summer school, workshops, timetabled practice sessions and additional examination revision sessions. The benefits, difficulties and shortcomings associated with each of the four approaches are described. We also present findings from a questionnaire investigating student uptake of mathematics support and student perceptions of mathematics difficulty. Whilst successful in helping most students who engage, the paper suggests that it is often those students who are most in need of help who do not take advantage of the available support. Possible reasons why students are not accessing additional support are proposed.

Project-Based Learning for First-Year Engineering Students: Design of CO2 Sequestration

This paper evaluates the teaching and learning outcomes from a first-year project-based engineering course at the University of New South Wales. The students worked in teams to design and build a device to sequester “CO2” into a reservoir. We present our observation of the peer assessments, performance prediction and diversity of the students. We found that some teams collaborated more effectively than others. We quantified this effectiveness using an online peer assessment that enables students to rate the performance of their teammates. These ratings were incorporated into the assignment of individual marks for group assignments. The analysis of the marks students achieved for various assessments and components of the course is presented. We observed that female students tended to out-perform their peers in both individual and team assessments, and students who did well in individual components of the course also did well in the team components. The use of early assessments to predict performance in later assessments seems to be difficult. However, there is a strong connection between students’ results for their design proposal and their results for the final design work. We are able to show statistically a significant improvement for marks for presentations but not for report writing. Anonymous surveys showed that about 90% of students were satisfied with their experience of the course. Students found this course to be challenging and enjoyable, giving them a good start in developing their skills as engineers.

Learning Cultures of Problem-Based Learning Teams

The learning experiences of first-year engineering students to a newly implemented engineering problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum is reported here, with an emphasis on student approaches to learning. Ethnographic approaches were used for data collection and analysis. This study found that student learning in a PBL team in this setting was mainly influenced by the attitudes, behaviour and learning approaches of the student members in that team. Three different learning cultures that emerged from the analysis of eight PBL teams are reported here. They are the finishing culture, the performing culture and the collaborative learning culture. It was found that the team that used a collaborative approach to learning benefited the most in this PBL setting. Students in this team approached learning at a deep level. The findings of this study imply that students in a problem-based, or project-based, learning setting may not automatically adopt a collaborative learning culture. Hence, it is important for institutions and teachers to identify and consider the factors that influence student learning in their particular setting, provide students with necessary tools and ongoing coaching to nurture deep learning approaches in PBL teams.

Design–build–test of model aerofoils for engineering education using FDM

A practical project undertaken by many first-year Engineering students at Lancaster University is to design, build and test a model wind turbine. Until recently it was difficult to produce convincing aerofoil shapes at small scale, but the recent acquisition of a fused-deposition modeller (FDM) has provided an opportunity to improve the accuracy of the model aerofoils that students can produce. This paper discusses the design method and tools used by the students, and the production of test blades. Particular note is made of the effects of the FDM construction on the blades, including the orientation of build and resulting surface finish, structural issues, and cost. Samples of graphics from student reports are presented, including some results for the efficiency of the turbines.

Accessibility Experience Lab: Discovering the Impact of Design on Disabilities

Many accessibility problems of devices and user interfaces could be avoided if the needs of people with disabilities were considered during the design process. This paper describes an accessibility experience lab module which introduces participants to both the barriers associated with disabilities and the impact that simple design changes can have on those barriers. The core of the lab is an experience session where participants are given functional limitations along with tasks at paired stations so they can compare their experiences on devices with inaccessible and accessible designs. For seven years the experience lab has been a part of the curriculum for first-year engineering students at the University of Wisconsin, and over 1700 students have completed it. In the popular lab, the students are engaged and report interest and insights into design for disabilities. Materials are available at www.trace.wisc.edu/training/explab/ .

A Semester-Long Seminar in Statistical Visualization for Undergraduates as Taught by a Science and Engineering Librarian

The development and instruction of an original and novel course in the School of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, is described. The seminar, aimed at first-year engineering students, explored excellence in quantitative display and asked students to study and critically examine a variety of maps, charts, and graphs as well as the underlying information and data sets. The instructor was a librarian with a dual purpose: to explore excellence in quantitative display in a way that just so happened to involve learning how to extract data from a library.

Design and Implementation of a Mechatronics Learning Module in a Large First-Semester Engineering Course

Since 2005, the first-year engineering program at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, has been significantly restructured to include more hands-on learning. A major grant (2004-2009) under the department level reform (DLR) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) facilitated this restructuring. A number of hands-on learning modules were developed and implemented within a required first-semester undergraduate course. One of the modules introduced mechatronics. The goal of this module is to introduce first-year engineering students to a portion of the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering disciplines within a collaborative setting. Interestingly, while the largest portion of engineering students in the United States are enrolled in electrical and mechanical engineering programs, there is a disparity between the percentage of male engineering students and female engineering students within those disciplines relative to the overall distribution of all students among the various engineering disciplines. By introducing all engineering students to mechatronics before students declare their specific discipline, the college hopes to attract more females to programs that suffer from a greater gender disparity than is already found within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This paper discusses the details of the implementation of the mechatronics initiative and gives student feedback that includes overall perception of the initiative and perception by gender.

Dificultades de los estudiantes universitarios en el aprendizaje de la inducción electromagnética

Este trabajo trata de las concepciones de los estudiantes de primer y tercer curso de universidad sobre la teoría de inducción electromagnética. En esta investigación analizamos la parte de la física correspondiente a la ley de Faraday de la inducción electromagnética dentro de la física clásica. La pregunta de investigación que ha orientado el trabajo es: ¿cuáles son las concepciones y formas de razonamiento de los estudiantes universitarios de ciencias e ingeniería sobre la inducción electromagnética? Hemos encontrado que muy pocos estudiantes son capaces de explicar dichos fenómenos de acuerdo con el modelo de la física clásica tanto en términos de campo (nivel macroscópico), como en términos de las acciones ejercidas por el campo (nivel microscópico).

The Relationship between Reported Workload, Stress and Employment Levels in First-Year Engineering Students

Engineering degree programs are notorious for placing considerable demands upon their students. Balancing study and work is a challenge faced by an increasing number of undergraduate students, and this balancing act can be stressful. This paper presents data gathered from first-year engineering students regarding their perceptions of their levels of stress and workload throughout a semester of study. Stress is investigated both as an absolute measure, and also as a measure relative to the students’ perception of “normal”. These data show that there is considerable variation in the perceptions of the cohort. There is a proportion of the cohort that are always highly stressed; similarly there is a proportion that never find themselves stressed at all. More importantly, the data shows that while stress and workload are linked, they are not equivalent. Relative stress does not always match absolute stress – there are students who are very stressed, but for whom this is normal; similarly there are students who are only slightly stressed, but for whom this is an increase on their usual non-stressed state. Students’ reported levels of workload were more variable than the measures of stress, suggesting that the relationship between stress and workload is more complex than simply “more work equals more stress”. Their self-reported levels of workload and stress are compared to each other and to the number of hours reported for study and paid employment. This comparison shows that while in general workload and stress are indeed linked, there is a substantial proportion of the cohort for whom these factors appear to be independent. In particular the link between absolute stress and workload appears weaker, suggesting that the issue may not be the actual level of stress, but rather the students’ perceptions of what constitutes a “normal” workload at a university level.

Bridging the Spatial Visualisation Skills Gap Through Engineering Drawing using the Whole-to-parts Approach

SummaryThis article reports on an attempt to bridge the spatial visualisation skills gap between 13 novices and 16 experts in one class of first-year civil engineering students. The aim of the study was to test the effectiveness of the whole-to-parts approach in bridging the skills gap between them. The results show that the teaching approach is capable of accelerating the learning of engineering drawing skills, and the approach has the potential to bridge the spatial visualisation skills gap between novices and experts in one semester course of study.

Making Problem-Solving in Engineering-Mechanics Visible to First-Year Engineering Students

An exploratory study was undertaken to investigate the conceptual knowledge and problem-solving skills of first-year engineering-mechanics students at the University of Auckland, Faculty of Engineering. Thirty five students participated in the study to analyse and measure the effect of a structured (heuristic) problem-solving strategy. By collecting and analysing both qualitative and quantitative data, a new problem-solving framework is developed. Implemented through a graphical organiser that enabled students to organise their qualitative knowledge and then apply it effectively in problem-solving. Through ANOVA, the effectiveness of this structured approach on problem-solving performance is measured. The average effect size measured d = 0.69 ± 0.05, and the average score increased by 12% ± 2% between the treatment and control groups. This increase was statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Overall this strategy is educational effective on dynamics curricula that the intervention was applied to, but was not transferred successfully to topics excluded from the strategy intervention. In conclusion, the research findings reported here imply that to enhance problem-solving performance, first-year students should focus their practice on the essential skills that they may lack; namely, qualitative knowledge and meta-cognitive skills.

Developing spatial cognitive skills among middle school students

In 1992, an initial grant was awarded from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US and a course was developed and implemented at Michigan Tech to help firstyear engineering students to develop their 3-D spatial skills. The course syllabus was created with topics sequenced in a fashion known to enhance spatial skills. A textbook (Baartmans and Sorby 1995) was written in support of the class outline. Computer exercises that utilized computer-aided design software were developed as a part of this initial grant activity with exercises designed to reinforce topics from class lectures (Sorby and Baartmans 2000). During freshman orientation in 1993, students who had declared majors of mechanical, civil, environmental, metallurgical, or general engineering were administered the PSVT:R (Guay 1977). In this initial year, a total of 96 out of 535 students failed the PSVT:R with a score of less than 60%. A random sample of 24 students who failed the PSVT:R was selected for participation in the experimental course and the remaining 72 students became the comparison group for the initial study. In examining the results from the PSVT:R for this initial group of students, the following observations were made. Although women made up only about 17% of the group taking the PSVT:R, they were about 43% of the group failing the test, making women nearly three times as likely to fail the PSVT:R than their male counterparts. Furthermore, of the 45 students who received perfect scores, only three were women. Male–female differences in failure and perfect score rates were statistically significant (P\ 0.01). In January 1998, a new grant was awarded from the NSF to replace the computer exercises that were developed as part of the initial funding (that were based on CAD software) with stand-alone multimedia software modules. Along with this software, a workbook was developed with sketching problems similar to those found to be helpful in helping students to develop their spatial skills. The result is a set of materials that was published by Cengage Learning in July 2002. The software modules, included as a CDROM in the back of the workbook, are stand alone and work with either a Mac or a PC. The software and workbook have been rigorously assessed to determine their effectiveness in improving spatial skills and to determine their usability from both a student’s and faculty member’s perspective. Through this evaluation, the effectiveness of the materials has been demonstrated for the use with firstyear engineering students (Gerson et al. 2001). Other findings from longitudinal studies conducted with engineering students are: (1) students with weak spatial skills who participated in the spatial skills training course earned better grades in a variety of follow-on engineering, science, and mathematics courses when contrasted with a similarly chosen comparison group and (2) women with weak spatial skills who participated in the spatial skills training course were more likely to be retained at the university when contrasted with women in a similarly chosen comparison group (Sorby 2001).

The Mars Challenge

This past autumn, I met with all 1700 first-year engineering students at Purdue University. I asked them what their generation's greatest technological legacy might be. Repeatedly, they told me: sending people to Mars.