LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots are being increasingly used in undergraduate courses, mostly in robotics-related subjects. But other engineering topics, like the ones found in data acquisition, control and real-time subjects, also have difficult concepts that can be well understood only with good lab exercises. Such exercises require physical…

This paper chronicles the development of an interdisciplinary course in environmentally conscious design at Kettering University, a technologically focused Midwestern university. Funded by the National Science Foundation, a team of six faculty members at Kettering University adapted work done by Ford Motor Company to educate undergraduate STEM…

The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for…

The curriculum for undergraduate engineering courses in Malaysia is becoming increasingly structured, following the global trend for quality assurance in engineering education, through accreditation schemes. Generally, the accreditation criteria call for the graduates from engineering programs to demonstrate a range of skills, from technical…

A solar power collector optimization design project has been developed for use in undergraduate classrooms and/or laboratories. The design optimization depends on understanding the current-voltage characteristics of the starting photovoltaic cells as well as how the cell's electrical response changes with increased light illumination. Students…

The Online Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering is a collaborative effort among three University Centers at SUNY (State University of New York), namely Stony Brook, Binghamton, and Buffalo. The program delivers the complete electrical engineering curriculum at the bachelor level to students online and asynchronously. Students, however,…

This paper describes the contribution of the Tuning Methodology toward harmonisation of undergraduate mechanical engineering programmes in Africa. This methodology is an interactive process in which academics develop high quality curricula and learning standards for students through the identification of generic and subject specific competences in…

Undergraduate engineering education in the United States is in need of reform that addresses the recruitment and retention of a diverse population of students. Change Chem is a curriculum reform model that has been created to address this issue for freshman students. This article reports on a mixed method efficacy study of Change Chem, which uses…

There has been a significant gap between the tools used for the design of a building's architectural form and those that evaluate the structural physics of that form. Seeking to bring the perspectives of visual design and structural engineering closer together, we developed and evaluated a design tool for students and practitioners to explore the…

Laboratory work is critical in undergraduate engineering courses. It is used to integrate theory and practice. This demands that laboratory activities are synchronized with lectures to maximize their derivable learning outcomes, which are measurable through assessment. The typical high costs of the traditional engineering laboratory, which often…

The performance of any engineering component depends on and is limited by the properties of the material from which it is fabricated. It is crucial for engineering students to understand these material properties, interpret them and select the right material for the right application. In this paper we present a new method to engage students with…

In engineering, like in many other disciplines, collaborative writing (CW) has been identified as a central practice in both the academy and industry. A number of studies have shown that both students and professionals in this field write most discipline-specific genres collaboratively. Despite its centrality, CW in engineering is still an…

Students often have difficulty grasping the principles of dimensional tolerances and frequently fail to recognize that dimensioning practice has a significant impact on the tolerance of part features. This observation may be attributed to several factors, not the least of which are changes in prior student education and life experiences and…

In this paper we discuss a pedagogical approach aimed at pointing out the role played by the Boltzmann factor in describing phenomena usually perceived as regulated by different mechanisms of functioning. Experimental results regarding some aspects of a chemical reaction and of the viscous flow of some liquids are analysed and described in terms…

This article focuses on the understudied role of research groups contributing to develop the knowledge base of developing universities in regions lagging behind in human, financial and scientific resources. We analyse the evolution of a research group that, in less than 10 years, achieved worldwide recognition in the field of microelectronics,…