Traditional Engineering Curriculum Research Articles

Development and Approval of a Master's Program in Clinical Engineering at Miami University

In Brief In order to meet the growing needs of the healthcare industry, which includes hospitals as well medical device companies, a targeted master's program in clinical engineering at Miami University was developed. The program has been approved by the State of Ohio and has begun enrolling students. The master of science in clinical engineering is rigorous with 34-semester credit hour, post–bachelor's degree, which provides a comprehensive understanding of the hospital-related medical equipment and facilities as well as best practices for project management and leadership facilities in the clinical and medical device manufacturing industry. It includes all aspects of the design and implementation of technologies toward improving the practice and delivery of healthcare. The coursework reflects 3 important components: (i) clinical engineering, which includes experiential training in addition to the fundamentals; (ii) hospital- based biomed instrumentation, and its design and regulatory approval process; and (iii) a management skill. The program structure sets it apart from a traditional biomedical engineering curriculum. The culminating experiences are the research thesis for the thesis option and the industrial practicum for the nonthesis option.

Discussion on the Reconstruction of Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Scheme Facing the New Generation Power System

With the construction of a new generation of electric power systems with new energy as the main body, there are major changes in the traditional electrical engineering undergraduate teaching system. On the one hand, the dynamic operating characteristics of the power system dominated by new energy sources and dominated by power electronic equipment will be significantly different from the traditional power system dominated by synchronous generators. Therefore, there is an urgent need to reform the curriculum system to train electrical engineering professionals who can adapt to the future development trend of the power system. On the other hand, with the rapid advancement of advanced information technology in recent years, the application of cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence in the field of electrical engineering has become more and more in-depth. Therefore, there is an urgent need to cultivate advanced technical experts who possess more advanced information theory and cybernetics knowledge and master the application of cutting-edge information technology in the field of electrical engineering. From the perspective of student training and professional construction needs, this paper systematically analyzes the lag of the traditional electrical engineering curriculum system, and analyzes the knowledge needs of electrical engineering students adapting to the development of the new generation of power systems. From the perspective of teaching schemes, curriculum systems, and evaluation systems, a plan for restructuring the teaching system was proposed. The work in this article can provide a reference for the training of college students majoring in electrical engineering, and it can also provide a more feasible improvement idea for the training of college students in other majors.

Hybrid propulsion and alternative fuels education in the course of decarbonised shipping

ABSTRACT The study investigates marine engineering education on alternative fuels and hybrid propulsion regarding decarbonisation of shipping. A new course is proposed for maritime education and training subject to the IGF Code amendments to the STCW which lasts 14 weeks and 3 h per week. Competences at the STCW amendments for the persons who work on alternative-fuelled ships are taken into account while preparing the course topics. Each topic is paired with basic and advanced training competencies of the STCW amendments, compliance with the STCW is provided, the course topics and sub-topics are explained, and the duration of the course is determined. The need for updating the curriculum and the training of future seafarers is crucial to satisfying their ability to operate future ships. This study highlights the need for novel approaches and courses regarding the new future technologies for the traditional marine engineering curriculum.

Teaching Programming to Chemical Engineering Students

Programming (including coding, data science, and artificial intelligence) is one of the important top skills for chemical engineering undergraduate students, especially in the current era of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0). Despite its importance, there is almost no dedicated course for programming in the traditional chemical engineering curriculum in many universities. In this article, a future chemical engineering curriculum that includes a programming course is discussed and its integration into traditional courses is also proposed. This study proposes to use three software i.e., Microsoft Excel, GAMS, and Python to make students comfortable to programming so they can learn further by themselves. A representative case of classic logistics problem is presented as a case study. It is expected that this teaching strategy and the proposed example will improve students’ cognition in programming.

CDIO Initiative: A Guarantee for Successful Accreditation of Engineering Programmes

The accreditation bodies and engineering councils set a number of qualifying requirements and accreditation criteria to ensure the quality of engineering graduates and programmes. One of these requirements is the engineering curriculum. Some institutions using the traditional engineering curriculum often face difficulties and burden to meet the accreditation minimum academic requirements as their curriculum lacks the innovation and the integration of graduate attributes such as personal, interpersonal, teamwork, entrepreneurship, development of life skills and emotional wellbeing, among many. This eventually leads to deferred or even declined accreditation. To overcome these difficulties, the CDIO initiative is an ideal tool for successful accreditation. The CDIO standards, syllabus, engineering curriculum, and learning outcomes are not only meeting what accreditation bodies require, but they offer innovative curriculum more on high-level cognitive skills set in the context of the product-system lifecycle; Conceiving-Designing-Operating-Implementing metaphases. This paper shares a successful engineering education experience of the School of Engineering/Taylor’s University and how the CDIO initiative contributed not only to a successful accreditation but also to have a new innovative engineering curriculum. The adopted new curriculum is innovative, hands-on and project-based in order to achieve integrated learning where acquiring discipline-specific knowledge and CDIO skills take place simultaneously

FPGA implementation of error control codes in VHDL: An undergraduate research project

AbstractError control codes (ECC) play an important role in the detection and correction of data errors over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The main idea of ECC is to add redundant bits to the message on the transmitter, which can be used to detect and correct certain errors on the receiver. ECC are used in numerous applications such as telecommunications, Internet, and data storage. Different types of ECC exist such as linear block, convolutional, and turbo codes. This paper presents results from an innovative undergraduate research project involving implementation of linear block, cyclic and convolutional codes in very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) using a field‐programmable gate array (FPGA). FPGA is a suitable platform for implementing ECC due to the advantages of performance, time to market, cost, reliability, and long‐term maintenance. As part of this project, (7,4) Hamming code used for linear block and cyclic codes and convolutional codes with constraint length k of 3 and code rate (k/n) of 1/2 were implemented in VHDL on a Xilinx Spartan‐6 FPGA using ISE 14.7. Two undergraduate students at Purdue University Northwest worked on this project. This was the students’ first exposure to ECC, VHDL, and FPGA, as undergraduate students are usually not introduced to these topics in traditional electrical and computer engineering curriculum. The goal of this project was to provide students with hands‐on experience using industry‐standard VHDL software and FPGA hardware platforms to implement ECC. This paper presents the results of this innovative project including register‐transfer level schematics, simulations, and VHDL code for encoders and decoders for the various ECC implemented, and students’ reflections on the project.

Three Birds, One Stone: A Pedagogy and Accreditation Driven Redesign

This paper describes a proposed redesign of the instruction and assessment of the Co-operative (Co-op) Education (or work term) components of the University of Victoria Engineering program. The redesign ensures instruction and assessment of the higher-level Graduate Attributes (GAs), such as individual and teamwork, communication skills, professionalism, impact on society, ethics and equity, economics and project management, and life-long learning, that may not be included in all of the technical courses in a traditional Engineering curriculum. Concurrently, the redesign includes a renewed emphasis on improving the technical writing competency of graduating engineers by: ‘laddering’ student technical writing development; introduction a new grading scheme; increased timeframes for report revisions; and, finally, reducing the number of pedagogically ineffective reports required to graduate.

Humanitarian Engineering: A New Interdisciplinary Course on the Application of Engineering Skills to Local and Global Humanitarian Challenges

Many students express a desire to apply their technical engineering skills to produce positive societal impacts, and although sustainability frameworks do take this into consideration in traditional engineering curricula, there are relatively few avenues for students to work on real global social issues during their undergraduate studies. This paper describes a new interdisciplinary course developed at UBC on the use of engineering skills to solve humanitarian challenges.The course is composed of case-study analyses, interactive activities and simulations, group discussions and seminars, and a technical design project completed in partnership with an NGO or charity working on a particular humanitarian challenge. The rationale and design of the course and its deliverables, as well as student feedback on this first iteration of this course are presented.

Balancing Academic Rigor and Creative Thinking: A Transformational Approach to Teaching Senior Design.

Innovation arises from creativity. "Thinking outside the box" has long been seen as a necessary precursor to innovation and invention in engineering. However, creativity is rarely part of traditional engineering curricula. In 2015, our group began to explore integrating theater-based creativity methods into bioengineering capstone design. Evaluation of student outcomes was encouraging, so we continued to develop the course in 2016 and 2017. As we worked to refine the pedagogical process, we discovered tensions (real or perceived) between providing academic rigor and allowing students to embrace their creativity; for instance, we experienced some resistance from engineering faculty and students toward adopting methods they viewed as "artsy" or lacking academic rigor. Here, we discuss the tensions we observed offer potential ways to mitigate such tensions and begin to consider how to expand on our successes.

Training Energy Data Scientists : Universities and Industry Need to Work Together to Bridge the Talent Gap

The workforce crisis is nothing new to the U.S. power industry. It has been a growing concern of both governments and industry organizations since the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the growth of data during the past decade has led to a demand surge for data analytics across all business sectors. The shortage of an electricity workforce and the increasing demand for data analytics present an emerging challenge as well as opportunity for university power engineering programs to bridge the data analytics talent gap. After gathering various perspectives from members of academia, industry, and government, we propose an interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial approach to revising the traditional power engineering curriculum for training the next generation of energy data scientists.

Cross-Disciplinary Service-Learning to Enhance Engineering Identity and Improve Communication Skills

Traditional engineering curricula often do not provide opportunities for students to experience working with non-technical collaborators on real projects. Such interactions may help engineering students develop relevant communication skills. In this study, junior level engineering students collaborated with junior level elementary education students to develop afterschool STEM clubs for elementary children. The study sought to identify the effects of a cross-disciplinary, project-based service-learning experience on: a) the development of a deeper understanding of engineering as a discipline and b) the development of skills necessary to communicate technical information to a non-technical audience. This paper describes the learning outcomes achieved by engaging undergraduate engineering students in cross-disciplinary working relationships. The results suggest that the cross-disciplinary experience affected learning in the knowledge, skills, attitudes and identity of student participants. Student learning was assessed through analysis of questionnaire responses and student reflections. The results also confirmed that simply knowing technical information does not correlate with the ability to communicate that same information. Students reported that they gained experience communicating technical content with non-technical audiences and developed leadership skills. Opportunities to learn communication skills were identified through student comments in course questionnaires and end of the semester focus group discussions.

Practical Elements of Mechanical Engineering – An Enrichment to University Engineering Education

Practical Elements of Mechanical Engineering (PEME) is an enrichment program developed by the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Western University in collaboration with Fanshawe College of Applied Arts and Technology. The PEME program was developed mainly in response to the changing backgrounds of students entering university engineering programs, and to provide an opportunity for students to get exposure to practical courses in machining, welding, metrology, and other practical areas, which complement the traditional Mechanical engineering curriculum. The PEME program is thus a formal avenue whereby students have an opportunity to gain some additional practical knowledge of their profession.

Practical Teaching and Learning Evaluation of Computational Fluid Dynamics Based on Traditional Chemical Engineering Curriculum

Practical teaching and learning evaluation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been incorporated into a chemical engineering curriculum at the intermediate undergraduate level. CFD has now become a component of professional life in engineering practice and to prepare students properly, they must get exposure to all aspects of their chosen profession. Issues of concern arise when mathematical modelling is being introduced into a curriculum. For example, at the practical level, it must be considered whether or not an appropriate platform has been developed to allow the students to use the software efficiently and importantly without frustration. Also it is important that students have been taught sufficient skills for the student to continue with simulations in a systematic and methodical manner. The incorporation of the CFD package into a traditional chemical engineering curriculum is described here, and evaluation results based on pre-post knowledge and skill experiments, and student survey results document successful learning outcomes and effectiveness of the approach.

Incorporating Sustainability and Green Engineering into a Constrained Civil Engineering Curriculum

AbstractRevised Bodies of Knowledge, constituent input, and student demand are motivating the incorporation of sustainability concepts in traditional engineering curricula. While a variety of metho...

Building on a traditional chemical engineering curriculum using computational fluid dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been incorporated into a chemical engineering curriculum at the intermediate undergraduate level. CFD has now become a component of professional life in engineering practice and to prepare students properly, they must get exposure to all aspects of their chosen profession. Issues of concern arise when mathematical modelling is being introduced into a curriculum. For example, at the practical level, it must be considered whether or not an appropriate platform has been developed to allow the students to use the software efficiently and importantly without frustration. Also it is important that students have been taught sufficient skills for the student to continue with simulations in a systematic and methodical manner. The incorporation of the CFD package into a traditional chemical engineering curriculum is described here, and evaluation results based on pre–post knowledge and skill experiments, and student survey results document successful learning outcomes and effectiveness of the approach.

Teaching design in the first years of a traditional mechanical engineering degree: methods, issues and future perspectives

Engineering design is known as an answer to an ill-defined problem. As any answer to an ill-defined problem, it can never be completely right or absolutely wrong. The methods that universities use to teach engineering design, as a consequence of this, suffer from the same fate. However, the accumulated experience with the ‘chalk and talk’ teaching tradition has led to a reality in which the employers of fresh graduates are not happy with the engineers they are getting. Part of their complaints are related with the inability of recently graduate engineers to work in problems where the boundaries are not well defined, are interdisciplinary, require the use of effective communication and integrate non-technical issues. These skills are mostly absent from traditional engineering curricula. This paper demonstrates the implementation of engineering design perspectives enhancing some of the aforementioned skills in a traditional mechanical engineering curriculum. It emphasises in particular a design project that is tackled in a sequence of conventional courses with a focus that depends on the course objectives and disciplinary domain. This transdisciplinary design project conveys the idea (and effectively implements it concurrently) that design is multidisciplinary.

Editorial

For those who haven't yet made the leap and are following the traditional engineering curricula - still stuck in the technical frame of mind - the author encourages his readers to start learning more about entrepreneurship. He feels that even if you don't come up with the next patentable breakthrough that will make bundles of money or change the world, it is still certainly worth learning. He the currently the CEO of his own company, making him one of 11.5 million entrepreneurs in the United States. It is a stark contrast from the traditional salaried engineering job, but it's a journey that he says is filled with risk and excitement.

Representations and Visual Synthesis in Engineering Design

BackgroundEngineers who engage with innovation and design rely on cooperation and knowledge sharing across multiple disciplines. However, the traditional engineering curriculum promotes and emphasizes engineering sciences and monodisciplinary skills and gives less priority to important collaborative skills such as sketching and visualization.PurposeThis article addresses how students engage with engineering design challenges and use visual representations to develop and integrate recognitions. Our study explores how technical, analytical disciplinary competences are combined with those of qualitative, ethnographic user studies.Design/MethodThrough a qualitative field study and an analysis of a collection of representations produced during a design process by a team of engineering students, the role of representations in the early stages of collaborative engineering design is explored. After reassembling the representations according to dates and themes, we deployed various perspectives from science and technology studies and engineering studies to assess the students' epistemic journey.ResultsRepresentations not only communicate findings but also incorporate analysis in their creation, and facilitate what we call collaborative design synthesis. Successful representations present and organize recognitions so that they are recognizable across other disciplines and can be integrated into new recognitions. Representations therefore shape the collaborative base of the design process and emphasize the important competences that can produce them.ConclusionsThe analysis shows that collaborative design synthesis is an epistemology consisting of (1) exploration, (2) inscription, (3) collection, and (4) combining and refining. The important ability of representations to draw together is termed transferability, and the competence to produce them, disciplinary mastery.

Epistemology of Knowledge for Technical and Engineering Education

There are three important components in engineering education which are knowledge, skill and attitude. Knowledge is defined as facts and concept of engineering education. The skills are those used by engineers in managing and applying their knowledge in solving problems. Whilst, attitude is how people use their skill and knowledge through personal values, concerns, preferences and biases toward their professional goal. The challenge of the century is to prepare a knowledgeable generation, particularly having the knowledge, skill and attitude beyond the range of traditional engineering curriculum. Thus, the focus of engineering education should shift from the simple presentation of knowledge to the concept of integration of knowledge. This requires a better understanding on the meaning of education. Hence, this article presents an attempt to crystallize the meaning of education, the concept of knowledge from philosophical perspective, and its relationship with human nature or fitrah. Based on the review, a conceptual model for epistemology of knowledge in engineering education is proposed.

A Perspective on Software Engineering Education with Open Source Software

As the development and use of open source software (OSS) becomes prominent, the issue of its outreach in an educational context arises. The practices fundamental to software engineering, including those related to management, process, and workflow deliverables, are examined in light of OSS. Based on a pragmatic framework, the prospects of integrating OSS in a traditional software engineering curriculum are outlined, and concerns in realizing them are given. In doing so, the cases of the adoption of an OSS process model, the use of OSS as a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool, OSS as a standalone subsystem, and open source code reuse are considered. The role of openly accessible content in general is discussed briefly.