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1. First Year Experience from RET Site: High School Teacher Experience in Engineering Design and Manufacturing

   Zhu, W. ( January 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   In 2019, University of Houston (UH) at Houston, Texas was awarded an NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site grant titled “RET Site: High School Teacher Experience in Engineering Design and Manufacturing.” The goal of the project is to host 12 high school teachers each summer to participate in engineering design and manufacturing research and then convert their experience into high school curriculum. In summer of 2021, the first cohort of 12 teachers from Region 4 of Southeast Texas participated in the RET program at UH College of Technology (COT). This six-week program, open to local high school STEM teachers in Texas, sought to advance educators’ knowledge of concepts in design and manufacturing as a means of enriching high school curriculums and meeting foundational standards set by 2013’s Texas House Bill 5. These standards require enhanced STEM contents in high school curricula as a prerequisite for graduation, detailed in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standard. Due to the pandemic situation, about 50% of the activities are online and the rest are face to face. About 40% of the time, teachers attended online workshops to enhance their knowledge of topics in engineering design and manufacturing before embarking on applicable research projects in the labs. Six UH COT engineering technology professors each led workshops in a week. The four tenure-track engineering mentors, assisted by student research assistants, each mentored three teachers on projects ranging from additive manufacturing to thermal/fluids, materials, and energy. The group also participated in field trips to local companies including ARC Specialties, Master Flo, Re:3D, and Forged Components. They worked with two instructional track engineering technology professors and one professor of education on applying their learnings to lesson plan design. Participants also met weekly for online Brown Bag teacher seminars to share their experiences and discuss curricula, which was organized by the RET master teacher. On the final day of the program, the teachers presented their curriculum prototype for the fall semester to the group and received completion certificates. The program assessment was led by the assessment specialist, Director of Assessment and Accreditation at UH COT. Teacher participants found the research experience with their mentors beneficial not only to them, but also to their students according to our findings from interviews. The mentors will visit their mentees’ classrooms to see the lesson plans being implemented. In the spring of 2022, the teachers will present their refined curricula at a RET symposium to be organized at UH and submit their standards-aligned plans to teachengineering.org for other K-12 educators to access. 

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2. A Rapid and Formative Response by the Engineering Education Faculty to Support the Engineering Faculty and Students Throughout the Extreme Classroom Changes Resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36606  

   White, Lance ; Jaison, Donna ; Ray, Samantha ; Brumbelow, Kelly ; Fields, Sherecce ; Barroso, Luciana ; Watson, Karan ; Hammond, Tracy ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This paper describes an evidence based-practice paper to a formative response to the engineering faculty and students’ needs at Anonymous University. Within two weeks, the pandemic forced the vast majority of the 1.5 million faculty and 20 million students nationwide to transition all courses from face-to-face to entirely online. Never in the history of higher education has there been a concerted effort to adapt so quickly and radically, nor have we had the technology to facilitate such a rapid and massive change. At Anonymous University, over 700 engineering educators were racing to transition their courses. Many of those faculty had never experienced online course preparation, much less taught one synchronously or asynchronously. Faculty development centers and technology specialists across the university made a great effort to aid educators in this transition. These educators had questions about the best practices for moving online, how their students were affected, and the best ways to engage their students. However, these faculty’s detailed questions were answerable only by faculty peers’ experience, students’ feedback, and advice from experts in relevant engineering education research-based practices. This paper describes rapid, continuous, and formative feedback provided by the Engineering Education Faculty Group (EEFG) to provide an immediate response for peer faculty guidance during the pandemic, creating a community of practice. The faculty membership spans multiple colleges in the university, including engineering, education, and liberal arts. The EEFG transitioned immediately to weekly meetings focused on the rapidly changing needs of their colleagues. Two surveys were generated rapidly by Hammond et al. to characterize student and faculty concerns and needs in March of 2020 and were distributed through various means and media. Survey 1 and 2 had 3381 and 1506 respondents respectively with most being students, with 113 faculty respondents in survey 1, the focus of this piece of work. The first survey was disseminated as aggregated data to the College of Engineering faculty with suggested modifications to course structures based on these findings. The EEFG continued to meet and collaborate during the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester and has continued through to this day. This group has acted as a hub for teaching innovation in remote online pedagogy and techniques, while also operating as a support structure for members of the group, aiding those members with training in teaching tools, discussion difficult current events, and various challenges they are facing in their professional teaching lives. While the aggregated data gathered from the surveys developed by Hammond et al. was useful beyond measure in the early weeks of the pandemic, little attention at the time was given to the responses of faculty to that survey. The focus of this work has been to characterize faculty perceptions at the beginning of the pandemic and compare those responses between engineering and non-engineering faculty respondents, while also comparing reported perceptions of pre- and post-transition to remote online teaching. Interviews were conducted between 4 members of the EEFG with the goal of characterizing some of the experiences they have had while being members of the group during the time of the pandemic utilizing Grounded theory qualitative analysis. 

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3. Curing “GFP-itis” in Bacteria with Base Editors: Development of a Genome Editing Science Program Implemented with High School Biology Students

   https://doi.org/10.1089/crispr.2023.0002  

   Vasquez, Carlos A. ; Evanoff, Mallory ; Ranzau, Brodie L. ; Gu, Sifeng ; Deters, Emma ; Komor, Alexis C. ( June 2023 , The CRISPR Journal)

   The flexibility and precision of CRISPR-Cas9 and related technologies have made these genome editing tools increasingly popular in agriculture, medicine, and basic science research for the past decade. Genome editing will continue to be relevant and utilized across diverse scientific fields in the future. Given this, students should be introduced to genome editing technologies and encouraged to consider their ethical implications early on in precollege biology curricula. Furthermore, instruction on this topic presents an opportunity to create partnerships between researchers and educators at the K-12 levels that can strengthen student engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. To this end, we present a 3-day student-centered learning program to introduce high school students to genome editing technologies through a hands-on base editing experiment in Escherichia coli, accompanied by a relevant background lecture and facilitated ethics discussion. This unique partnership aims to educate students and provides a framework for research institutions to implement genome editing outreach programs at local high schools. We have included all requisite materials, including lecture slides, worksheets, experimental protocols, and suggestions on active learning strategies for others to reproduce our program with their local communities. 

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4. Multi Institutional Collaboration in Additive Manufacturing: Lessons Learned

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34987  

   Littrell, Michael ; Chitiyo, George ; Fidan, Ismail ; Cossette, Mel ; Singer, Thomas ; Tackett, Ed. ( June 2020 , Proceedings of the 2020 ASEE Annual Conference)

   One of the fastest growing fields in the broad field of engineering is Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D Printing. AM is being used in many fields including, among others, design, STEM, construction, art, and healthcare. Many educational institutions however, do not have the requisite capacity and resources to effectively educate students in this area particularly when it comes to rapid transition from design to small-volume level production. A coalition of several higher education institutions under a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Project has been working towards providing educators with the skills and material resources to effectively teach their students about 3D printing. The ultimate beneficiaries are high school and post-secondary students and include those in vocational fields. Before and during Fall 2019, Train the Trainer Studios (TTS) were conducted to train instructors, drawing participants from many institutions across neighboring states designed to provide hands-on instruction to participants. In addition, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and webinars have also been made available to all participating instructors and other collaborators to openly share the information being generated through this ATE AM coalition. Evaluation of the TTS revealed many positive results, with the participants sharing many success stories after implementing the learned concepts at their institutions. From the evaluation findings, participants were largely satisfied with the delivery and quality of instruction they received from all the TTS presenters, with almost all of them, in all instances, indicating that the training they received would be useful in their programs. The current paper and proposed presentation will report on the lessons learned through this process, including sharing some of the success stories from the instructors and their students. 

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5. Students Talk: The Experience of Advanced Technology Students at Two-Year Colleges during COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--37767  

   Barger, Marilyn ; Jayaram, Lakshmi ( July 2021 , ASEE Conferences)

   There have been many questions and concerns raised by educators about how advanced technology students will adapt to remote learning during the COVID era. What will technician students’ academic engagement and persistence be like, and how will online learning affect their educational outcomes? What do technician students like about remote learning and what do they find challenging? What does online learning mean for hands-on applied and experiential learning, which are hallmarks of technical education programs? This paper explores pilot survey data collected in Florida from advanced technology students at two-year colleges. Five primary areas covered in the survey include enrollment status, access to technology, experience using a Learning Management System and learning online, impact on applied and experiential learning, and students’ background information. Key findings include decreased interaction between peers, increased reliance on instructors, and a significant decline in experiential learning such as labs, group projects, demonstrations, problem-based learning, and service-learning. The majority of students report feeling worried about making progress toward their degree, and about half worried about completing the semester. Two benefits students identified as having access to course materials all the time through the LMS and the flexibility of remote learning. Findings also show that technician students are quite diverse by way of age, partner status, having a family, race-ethnicity, employment status, and educational background. About one-third of students who responded are women. This paper concludes with several recommendations about the application of these research findings to address challenges technician students face learning online, including specific actions that instructors and programs can pursue to help retain students and provide support through the completion of degree programs. 

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