Access to lower-division engineering courses in the community college substantially influences whether or not community college students pursue and successfully achieve an engineering degree. With about 60% of students from under-represented minority (URM) groups beginning their post-secondary education in the community colleges, providing this access is critical if the US is to diversify and expand its engineering workforce. Still many community college lack the faculty, equipment, or local expertise to offer a comprehensive transfer engineering program, thus compromising participation in engineering courses for underrepresented groups as well as for students residing in rural and remote areas, where distance is a key barrier to post-secondary enrollment. An additional obstacle to participation is the need for so many community college students to work, many in inflexible positions that compromise their ability to attend traditional face-to-face courses. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program (NSF IUSE), three community colleges from Northern California collaborated to increase the availability and accessibility of the engineering curriculum by developing resources and teaching strategies to enable small-to-medium community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. This paper focuses on the development and testing of the teaching and learning resources for Introduction to Engineering, a three-unit course (two units of lecture and one unit of lab). The course has special significance as a gateway course for students who without the role models that their middle class peers so often have readily available enter college with very limited awareness of the exciting projects and fulfilling careers the engineering profession offers as well as with apprehension about their ability to succeed in a demanding STEM curriculum. To this end, the course covers academic success skills in engineering including mindset and metacognition, academic pathways, career awareness and job functions in the engineering profession, team building and communications, the engineering design process, and a broad range of fundamental and engaging topics and projects in engineering including electronics, basic test equipment, programming in MATLAB and Arduino, robotics, bridge design, and materials science. The paper presents the results of a pilot implementation of the teaching materials in a regular face-to-face course which will be used to inform subsequent on-line delivery. Additionally, student surveys and interviews are used to assess students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the course resources, along with their sense of self-efficacy and identity as aspiring engineers.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2024
Teacher Perspectives of Outcomes and Challenges Resulting from Students' Interactions with MATLAB in e4usa (Fundamental)
As part of the e4usa curriculum, a MATLAB model has been developed and implemented in order to cultivate engineering and computational thinking skills in high school students. The MATLAB model uses a live script that allows students to interact with sliders and dropdown menus to change parameters on a water filtration model. With computational skills increasingly in demand, the literature suggests that adding computational thinking and coding skills as a new form of literacy is crucial for preparing future engineering professionals. Additionally, to ensure that students are better prepared by the time they reach their post-secondary studies, early exposure to computational thinking skills has valuable implications. In this fundamental paper, we describe outcomes resulting from students' interactions with MATLAB in e4usa. The mathematical model allows the students to analyze the effects of different filtration materials, impurities to be removed, length of the water filter, and the space between particles in their filtration material. Using at first a mathematical model rather than testing physical materials will allow them to learn more about their potential filtration materials so that they may make more informed decisions about which filtration materials they want to select for their design and use in the prototype that they build and test. With that said, we focus on student outcomes in this design activity. We hypothesize that this modeling activity prior to design may reduce the time spent in physical testing as well as the volume of materials consumed. Additionally, we are inquisitive about the impact that it has on the subsequent design activities compared to previous semesters where this lesson was taught, where it was observed that students spend a considerable amount of time trying out different materials. As part of our data, we have collected teacher data from surveys, pre and post-responses about their expectations, attitudes, and perceived value of implementing the MATLAB model in their classrooms, class observation data from at least two schools where we noted the interactions between the teachers and students, and teacher and student focus groups at the end of the semester where we expect to collect richer data from these two groups that will allow us to triangulate data collected from surveys and classroom observations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2120746
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10435544
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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