Community: Freshman Engineering Students:, Engineering Exploration ( EngE ) 1024

1. Community:Freshman Engineering Students:, Engineering Exploration (EngE) 1024

2. Outline Structure Sustainable Energy Design Project Tablet PC Faculty Composition Identity Construction Hands On

3. Course Structure

4. Course Structure: • Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering is the sixth larges U.S. engineering program in terms of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2002. • Course developed in 2005 • All freshmen engineering students at VT undergo a common first year General Engineering (GE) and are assigned to the Division of Engineering Fundamentals recently renamed Department of Engineering Education (ENGE). • Students transfer from ENGE to eleven degree-granting departments as sophomores. • Target enrollment in GE has been 1300 freshmen for the past decade, but this number increased to about 1600 in2004. • All Engineering freshmen at VT take a two-credit Engineering Exploration (Enge 1024) course during their first semester of enrollment.

5. Background General Engineering program for freshmen Varied backgrounds (programming, math, physics, technological skills) Students in the same workshop meet twice a week (lecture and workshop)

6. Larger teacher panel Seven faculty members 12 graduate teaching assistants 2 senior undergraduate students 7 undergraduates assisted grading papers Old timers available for new comers Ensure the authenticity of tasks on different topic

7. Sustainable Energy Design Project

8. Sustainable Energy Design Project (SEDP) • In workshop, students randomly assigned to teams of four • Each team required to design for one of four sources of energy • wind, hydropower, solar, biomass • Students required to complete individual and group assignments (eight week timeline) • Present a prototype design • design a “promotional invention” for the assigned energy source

9. SEDP Individual and Team Artifacts: • Individual Research Paper and Proposal • Individual Sketch of Group Design • Team Research and Proposal Paper • Team Prototype (physical impl. of design) • Team Log (record of member participation) • Team Demo (feedback to other groups) • Team Final Report (full record of design & implementation by each group)

10. OneNote shared sessions: Draw/modify sketches in the same shared session as a group share the sketch with the instructor for feedback Instructor can forward student’s sketch to the entire class Students can modify shared sketch Collaboration in SEDP SEDP Prototype of One Group (Wind Energy)

11. Focus Group Interviews - Teamwork helped students to learn to work together in a group to produce a successful product • Externalization tenet: Record of mental effort • Being able to reflect on it themselves • Peer reviewed: other teams see & give feedback • Instructor reviewed • Use of technical symbols to negotiate meaning

12. Focus Group Interviews -“Different people to bounce ideas from, working together.” -“Different ideas are great.” • Perspectival tenet: Meaning making • Interaction creates meaning • Alternative meaning based on different views • Interactional tenet: • passing knowledge and skills • negotiate meaning

13. Focus Group Interviews - “It [the project] forces you to write everything out before hand. This is especially important if you need to explain it to someone else.” • Constraints tenet • Use of vocabulary and symbol • Equipping learners to more powerful symbolic systems

14. Focus Group Interviews: Legitimization and Situatedness - Some of the students felt that the teamwork experience has helped them to identify strong and weak members. - Mixed opinions on whether a leader in each group is needed. Some stated that one person needs to initiate the meetings only. - Others commented that there need to be a leader, one who provides structure and orderliness to the meetings - “There is still the issue of worrying about other people’s output and responsibility.” - “Liked the group; more like a real world situation. It forced communication (also had a good group).”

15. Legitimization from Novice to Expert • Learners are legitimized to move from the periphery into the core by • Positive feedback from the instructor • Positive feedback from other groups with the same assigned energy source (different ways of thought) • Positive feedback from other groups with different assigned energy source (thinking in a higher abstraction level: beyond one source of energy) • Division of labor between group members based on expertise in different project tasks

16. Tablet PC Applications in a Large Engineering Program

17. Examples of instructional activities included • Electronic note taking • Use of inking features to review homework solutions • Completing skeleton PowerPoint slides designed to increase the engagement level of students in a large classroom • Setting up online collaboration sessions to do group design project and problem solving activities

18. Tablet PC Application Strategies • Use of Digital Ink • key pieces of content were intentionally left out • Homework Solutions and Review • Students wrote the homework solutions in OneNote and turned in hardcopies • OneNote documents • Every ink stroke made in the shared document on one student’s machine shows up on each of the other student’s machines • DyKnow: Live sharing & Annotating of Instructor’s Notes (lecture)

19. Tablet PC Application Strategies • Collaborative Problem Solving In Workshop • They typically worked individually on the problems for 5-10 minutes and then entered into a shared session with a few of the students around them to discuss their individual approaches to the problem • Design Project Work • Tablet PCs were used in various facets of the semester design project (hydropower, solar, wind, and biomass) • Flowchart Correction • Flowcharts are discussed in EngE1024 to develop algorithmic skills

20. Links to Situated Learning • Collaborative Problem Solving In Workshop • Social interaction is a key component of situated learning • Design Project Work • Situated learning presumes that most learning is context-dependent, so that cognitive experiences situated in authentic activities such as project-based learning can stimulate learning

21. Other Factors

22. Identity Construction • Teaching of engineering ethics • Incident at Morales video watching and discussion • Incident at Morales involves a variety of ethical issues faced by a company that wants to quickly build a plant in order to develop a new chemical product to gain a competitive edge over the competition. Potential technical and ethical issues arise from choices of designs, including valves, piping, chemicals, etc. The process to develop the product is designed to be automated and controlled by computer software. The process also involves high temperatures and pressures and requires the use of chemicals that need special handling. Because of environmental considerations related to the chemicals used in the process, the company decides to construct their plant in Mexico. Technical, environmental, financial, and safety problems arise that involve ethical issues. • Group ethics presentation

23. Identity Construction Value of teamwork: IDEO video watching Introduction of attributes of future engineers Introduction of globalization practices in engineering Student presentation on a contemporary engineering issue Student reflection on ethical aspect of a recent natural disaster Presentation from researchers’ abroad experience

24. An additional 110-minute workshop for hands-on and collaboration • Authentic practice in designing experiment and data colleting • Water tower experimental apparatus • Sustainable Development Design Project • Teamwork • Situatedness • Collaboration

25. Student response to the new format of teaching “…I really didn’t know what engineering really was…But after taking the course, I fell more confident about what engineering is and I also know that I am very interested in it and I like it a lot.” “I definitely didn’t expect to learn so much about the connection as engineers to the world.” “How to apply my skills to a real life problem such as water tower experiment and calculations.” “I feel like I can work with people better than I used to…”

26. Student response to the new format of teaching “…Class was by far the biggest waste of time and a pointless exercise…” “All the pointless stuff like graphing and MATLAB.” “I would be this turned away from the engineering major. I feel pretty bad about how I did in this class.”

27. Introduction • First freshman engineering course • 1,500 engineering freshmen enrolled in EngE 1024 course

28. Course Structure • Course activities are designed to develop: • problem solving • critical thinking • engineering design skills • Activities involve use of technology: • tablet PC based instruction • classroom interaction software

29. QUESTIONS?????