Search for: All records

Classical mechanics courses are taught to most engineering disciplinary undergraduate students. Due to the recent advancements of multiscale analysis and practice, necessary reforms need to be investigated and explored for classical mechanics courses to address the materials’ mechanics behaviors across multiple length scales. This enhanced understanding is needed for engineering students to consider materials more broadly. This paper presents a recent effort for the development of a multiscale materials and mechanics experimentation (M3E) module that can be potentially implemented in undergraduate mechanics courses, including Statics, Dynamics, Strength of Materials, and Design of Mechanical (Machine) Components. The developed education module introduces the concepts of multiscale materials behavior and microstructures in the form of micro and macro-scales. At the micro-scale, both 3D printed aluminum and cold-rolled aluminum samples were characterized using scanning electron microscope. Microstructures, including grains, grain boundaries, dislocation, precipitates, and micro-voids, were demonstrated to students. At the macro-scale, experiments following ASTM standards were conducted and full strain fields carried by all the samples were analyzed using digital image correlation method. The experimental data were organized and presented to the students in the developed M3E module. The implementation of the developed module in undergraduate mechanics classes allows students to not only visualize materials behavior under various load conditions, but also understand the reasons behind classical mechanics properties. To assess the effectiveness of the developed M3E education module, an evaluation question was developed. Students are required to classify key mechanics, materials, and processing concepts at both micro and macroscales. More than 40 fundamental concepts and keywords are included in the tests. The study outcomes and effectiveness of the M3E education module will be reported in this paper. 

Engineering programs, in general, do not explicitly address the need to enhance divergent thinking. To a certain extent this is due to a lack in knowledge on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying divergent thinking, and creative ideation more generally. We hypothesize that we can help enhance our students’ divergent thinking and creative processing outcomes by investigating the impacts of carefully selected methods and tools enabled by developments in the robust analysis of engineering ideation performance, and neurocognitive responses to creativity. In this paper, we present an experiment using the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) technique and creative language use (funded by Core R&D Programs). More specifically, we collected ERP responses to literal, nonsense, and novel metaphorical sentences that were either referring to engineering knowledge or general knowledge, testing engineering and non-engineering students. Following Rutter et al. [1], sentences differed in verb only and had been classified in prior sentence norming studies as highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphors), low unusual and highly appropriate (literal sentences), and highly unusual and low appropriate (nonsense sentences). Participants read sentences while their EEG was recorded, and after reading the sentence made judgments about its unusualness and appropriateness. The findings indicate that prior knowledge modulates novel metaphor processing at the stage of lexico–semantic access, indexed by the amplitude of N400 component. Specifically, N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences are significantly reduced and pattern with literal sentences in engineers; in nonengineers, by contrast, we observed increased N400 amplitudes to novel metaphorical sentences that pattern with anomalous sentences. This mirror effect on the N400 corroborates recent findings demonstrating a strong impact of prior experience and expertise on meaning ambiguity resolution, which may in turn have implications for creative cognition. 

Creativity is the driver of innovation in engineering. Hence, assessing the effectiveness of a curriculum, a method, or a technique in enhancing the creativity of engineering students is no doubt important. In this paper, the process involved in quantifying creativity when measured through the alternative uses task (AUT) is explained in detail. The AUT is a commonly used test for divergent thinking ability, which is a main aspect of creativity. Although it is commonly used, the processes used to score this task are far from standardized and tend to differ across studies. In this paper, we introduce these problems and move towards a standardized process by providing a detailed account of our quantification process. This quantification process takes into consideration four commonly used dimensions of creativity: originality, flexibility, fluency, and elaboration. AUT data from a preliminary case study were used to illustrate how the AUT and the quantification process can be used. The study was performed to understand the effect of the stereotype threat on the creativity of 25 female engineering students. The results indicate that after the stereotype threat intervention, participants generated more diverse and original ideas.