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1. Early lessons learned from pivoting an REU program to a virtual format

   Guessous, L. ( June 2022 , 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Since the summer of 2006, the NSF-funded AERIM Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University has been offering rich research, professional development, networking and cohort-building experiences to undergraduate students in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. With a focus on hands-on automotive and energy research projects and a proximity to many automotive companies, the program has been successful at attracting a diverse group of students. In fact, a total of 104 students from 70 different universities have participated in the program over the past 15 years, with about 70% of the participants coming from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in engineering (women in particular). Most research projects have been team-based and have typically involved experimental and analytical work with perhaps a handful of numerical simulation-based projects over the years. Prior assessment has shown that students greatly valued and benefited from interacting with faculty mentors, industry professionals, industry tours, and each other. As a result of limitations placed on in-person meeting and on-campus activities impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the program had to pivot to a virtual format in the summer of 2021. This virtual format brought about several challengesmore »and opportunities, which will be discussed in this paper. Despite the virtual format, the program was successful at attracting a diverse group of students in 2021. Twelve undergraduate students from eight different institutions took part remotely in the program and encompassed several time zones ranging from Eastern Standard Time to Alaska Standard Time. The 2021 cohort included seven women, three underrepresented minorities, and two students with a reported disability. Also noteworthy is the fact that half of the students were first generation in college students. While the PIs were happy with the student make up, running the program in a virtual format was very challenging. For one, what was traditionally a hands-on, experimental research program had to pivot to completely simulation/analytical based projects. This brought about issues related to remote access to software, time lags and difficulties with engaging students while computer simulations were running remotely. While the program was able to offer several seminars and meetings with industry professionals in a virtual fashion, it was not possible to provide industry tours or the casual conversations that would spontaneously occur when meeting face to face with industry professionals. Finally, with students logging in from their homes across the country and across different time zones rather than living together in the Oakland University dorms, the usual bonding and group interactions that would normally occur over the summer were difficult to replicate. In this paper we discuss what was learned from these challenges and how the virtual format also offered opportunities that will be utilized in future years.« less
2. 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 researchmore »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.« less
3. Undergraduate Hypersonics Research: Lessons From Two Years of the REU Site HYPER

   https://doi.org/10.1115/GT2022-81021  

   Kauffman, Jeffrey L. ; Gordon, Ali P. ( June 2022 , ASME Turbo Expo 2022)

   The University of Central Florida (UCF) trains future engineers and scientists for research-oriented careers through a number of programs and initiatives. One of the most recent is a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site based on next-generation transportation and energy housed within the Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research (CATER) and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE). The site unites eleven multi-disciplinary research projects around HYpersonic, Propulsive, Energetic, and Reusable Platforms (HYPER). A key goal of HYPER is to equip and motivate undergraduate students to pursue graduate school and/or a research-oriented career, particularly across a diverse student participant cohort. The site has held two cohorts, engaging 25 students in a ten-week intensive experience, conducting research under the guidance of faculty mentors and graduate students. Students explored career options through industry tours, professional development seminars, and mentor-led research seminars. This paper reports the program impacts on the students and discusses several lessons learned across the cohorts.
4. Undergraduate Summer Research in High-performance Computing with Engineering Applications: An Experience Report

   Hou D., Liu Y. ( June 2020 , 2020 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Virtual Annual Conference)

   High Performance Computing (HPC) stands at the forefront of engineering innovation. With affordable and advanced HPC resources more readily accessible than ever before, computational simulation of complex physical phenomena becomes an increasingly attractive strategy to predict the physical behavior of diverse engineered systems. Furthermore, novel applications of HPC in engineering are highly interdisciplinary, requiring advanced skills in mathematical modeling, algorithm development as well as programming skills for parallel, distributed and concurrent architectures and environments. This and other possible reasons have created a shortage of qualified workforce to conduct the much-needed research and development in these areas. This paper describes our experience with mentoring a cohort of ten high achieving undergraduate students in Summer 2019 to conduct engineering HPC research for ten weeks in X University. Our mentoring activity was informed and motivated by an initial informal study with the goal to learn the roles and status of HPC in engineering research and what can be improved to make more effective use of it. Through a combination of email surveys, in-person interviews, and a manual analysis of faculty research profiles in X University, we learn several lessons. First, a large proportion of the engineering faculty conducts research that is highly mathematicalmore »and computational and driven by disciplinary sciences, where simulation and HPC are widely needed as solutions. Second, due to the lack of resources to provide the necessary training in software development to their students, the interviewed engineering groups are limited in their ability to fully leveraging HPC capability in their research. Therefore, novel pathways for training and educating engineering researchers in HPC software development must be explored in order to further advance the engineering research capability in HPC. With a multi-year support from NSF, our summer research mentoring activities were able to accommodate ten high-achieving undergraduate students recruited from across the USA and their faculty mentors on the theme of HPC applications in engineering research. We describe the processes of students recruitment and selection, training and engagement, research mentoring, and professional development for the students. Best practices and lessons learned are identified and summarized based on our own observations and the evaluation conducted by an independent evaluator. In particular, improvements are being planned so as to deliver a more wholistic and rigorous research experience for future cohorts.« less
5. The Endeavour S-STEM Program: A Multi-College Collaboration to Increase Engagement and Retention in STEM

   de la Rosa-Pohl, Diana ; Horn, Catherine ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   Background & Program Description: The link between student engagement and retention is well-established in the education literature. As a result, many colleges have developed first-year experience programs to engage students in early technical work and to promote community-building. However, many of these student success programs require participation in extracurricular activities, which require time outside of class. Yet time for extracurricular activities is a luxury that many students of low socioeconomic status (SES) cannot afford due to family or work obligations. The Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) program, funded by the National Science Foundation, provides crucial financial support to high-achieving low-SES STEM students. The S-STEM scholarships give students the option to work less or not at all. The intended result is that students regain the time afforded to their more privileged peers, thereby also giving them the opportunity to more effectively engage with their institution, studies, and peers. The Endeavour Program is a two-year program that incorporates the S-STEM financial support into a multi-faceted and multi-college program in STEM designed to increase the level of student engagement in school. The scholars, who are recruited from three colleges, take classes together, work on hands-on team projects, attend professional and personal development events, participatemore »in outreach events, and conduct research with faculty mentors. Over the course of the two-year program, four dimensions of student engagement (academic, behavioral, cognitive, and affective) are tracked to determine the appropriateness of using these engagement levels as predictors of success. Results: Two cohorts of 20 students were recruited in the fall of 2017 and in the fall of 2018. The first cohort completed the two-year program in the spring of 2020, and the second cohort began the second year of the program in the fall of 2020. No third cohort was recruited in 2020 due the Covid19 pandemic. The third and fourth cohorts will now enter the program in the fall of 2021 and the fall of 2022 respectively. Overall, the results of the Endeavour Program have been positive. The final retention outcome for the first cohort (the only cohort to complete the program thus far) was 85% (17/20). Retention for the second cohort is currently at 100% (20/20). Initial results show that the S-STEM scholars are performing academically as well as their peers who do not share the same risk factors. In addition, the number of completed hours is also on par with their peers. However, the most significant gains were observed in the qualitative data. Students expressed fears and anxieties about the high school to college transition and reported that the guidance provided and the community formed through the Endeavour Program alleviated many of those negative emotions. The full paper shows student engagement data obtained over time for the first and second cohorts as well as lessons learned and directions for future work. Also, examples of advising charts created in an engagement data dashboard show how the quantitative engagement data has been compiled and organized to show early warning signs for current and future cohorts.« less