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It is essential that elementary students are exposed to engineering at an early age to help build a base of knowledge on which to expand later in their schooling. With the world constantly advancing in terms of technology, elementary education (ELED) teachers are not well equipped to teach engineering to elementary students. With this in mind, for the past two decades Iowa State University has offered...
Learning Analytics (LA) is currently the most effective way of achieving better information and in-depth insights of the learning processes. Specifications like Experience API (xAPI) have been defined as part of LA initiatives to add interoperability among LA-aware applications. Tools that validate the conformance of data to these specifications are key components to assure the interoperability among...
Interactive learning tools allow students to explore STEM concepts deeply, improving educational outcomes. Interactive tools that use cloud computing resources can (1) explore computationally intensive concepts and (2) seamlessly link concepts to graphical representations. When these goals conflict, good design, and implementation principles are needed to (1) preserve interactive response times and...
Though considerable attention and resources have been dedicated over a few decades to improve the representation of women in engineering fields, the issues of underrepresentation still exist, especially among the tenure track and research faculty. “Chilly” climate models of underrepresentation discuss these and other barriers to women's persistence, including implicit gender bias in the department...
In this work, effects of inquiry cycles on freshmen engineers are evaluated. In particular reflection based methods are studied and discussed. The paper summarizes our early findings of a phenomenographical analysis of student reflections. A first year engineering course was designed as Deweyean inquiry-base class allows freshmen engineers to think, learn and engage with old and new concepts while...
Many schools are incorporating project-based interdisciplinary exercises into their engineering curriculum in order to develop the qualitative and quantitative skills simultaneously. It has been shown that introducing design in a freshman engineering course has a positive impact on retention, stimulates interest in engineering and enhances communication, teaming and time management skills. But can...
Your school reached its target percentage for women in engineering. So what? And now what? With all the discussion and reporting of percentages of women in engineering, educators may be tempted to assume that attaining a target number, or ‘critical mass,’ alone solves the problems related to engagement of a gender diverse student body. We argue that while critical mass may be necessary, it is insufficient...
Designing course activities in harmony with class assignments and tests while providing both adequate challenges and appropriate content progression is critical in introductory programming courses (CS1). Such fine-tuned practices help students build the right mindset to perform better and prevent potential discouragement due to disharmonious test challenges. In this study, we apply levels of the cognitive...
This work-in-progress research paper begins to explore stories told by 12 diverse engineering undergraduates about how they chose engineering as a major in their studies. The students were interviewed during Fall 2016 about their pathways into engineering, their identities, and their belongingness in engineering. The participants were selected from a pool of students who completed an attitudinal survey...
In this paper, we perform a high-level comparison between different modifications of an entry-level programming course in computer science. The course iterations feature an online tutoring component paired with (i) textbook/traditional lecture/lab, as well as (ii) active learning in a specially designed active learning room, and (iii) active learning in a computer laboratory, both featuring an online...
A program at Iowa State University, Make to Innovate (M:2:I), allows students to work on real world engineering problems through a problem-based learning framework. Over the five years this program has been operating, observational data and student feedback have been collected identifying a potential issue with students' success in their projects. In most cases, this was not due to a lack of technical...
Soft skills are increasingly important to the engineering profession and course modifications are often needed to ensure students have opportunities to practice them prior to graduation. This suggests that engineering programs need to go beyond simply offering industry-based capstone courses and internships. Role-play has a long history as a tool for learning. It can be used to simulate real world...
This paper presents tools the author uses to enhance student motivation in a microcontroller-based embedded systems course. The course is offered as part of a requirement in a computer engineering degree program. In the traditional lecture-based teaching and learning process, information typically flows in one direction with very little active involvement by the students. There are a number of techniques...
Remote Laboratories are used in educational settings as tools to give students access to experiments that are not physically available to them at their institutions. During implementation, problems such as: bandwidth, security or limitations in terms of the usability, have been identified. This paper proposes an approach that integrates, what we call, a Smart Adaptive Remote Laboratory (SARL) with...
To correctly engage in the instrument development process takes time. According to Benson's model of construct validation (1) there are at least three lengthy stages (substantive, structural, external) to construct validation when developing a new measure. This study examines how instrument structure impacts the validation process and what it can tell us about instrument revision. In this study we...
The engineering disciplines of industrial engineering, engineering management, and systems engineering are replete with abstract concepts without physical representations that are inherently difficult to learn. Hence, this study is motivated by engineering students' inability to understand abstract concepts and the need for continuous improvement of student learning. In this study, in the context...
The amount of data is exploding, and by all estimations will continue its exponential growth. This has led to an increased demand for engineers and data scientists. However, courses imparting crucial ideas from data design, administration and maintenance to data analytics and knowledge discovery remain under-subscribed due to perceived difficulty, low interest and motivation. This motivation can be...
This paper argues that by carrying out an integrated series of technical investigations and cultural activities in a foreign country, students can have a realistic experience of global engineering field work. This work-in-progress explores the conception, design, implementation and preliminary review of a week-long study abroad course that simulates an intensive field investigation in a remote context,...
Students engaged in a design process need to diagnose their information needs, gather resources, evaluate their quality and apply them appropriate to make evidence-based decisions about potential solutions to their problems. Much of students' information management process typically is hidden from instructors, which makes evaluation of their underlying information literacy skills difficult. In a first-year...
This paper proposed an innovative education platform-VREX (Virtual Reality based Education eXpansion), with combination of online and offline, to improve the curriculum building and teaching experience. VREX is based on Virtual Reality (VR) and we believe VR can revolutionize the education ecosystem. With some trials, we found VR can be used to promote curriculum effectiveness in an immersive environment...
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