Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly engaged in the urgent and important work involved in the global transition towards sustainable development. They are potentially well suited to address key challenges, being as they are knowledge and talent 'factories'. Beyond their educational mission, HEIs are particularly well placed to…

In product design, there is often a disconnect between the engineers creating the product and the marketing team determining the best characteristics for the product. The research areas of "design for market systems" and "decision-based design" seek to bridge that disconnect through quantitative approaches that facilitate…

This article discusses two multidisciplinary courses created at the Colorado School of Mines that were developed to integrate ethics into the first-year engineering curriculum: "Nature and Human Values" (NHV) and "Innovation and Discovery in Engineering, Arts, and Sciences" (IDEAS). In both NHV and IDEAS, our objectives are to…

Ethical engineering practice is a global issue. However, cultural norms and social realities may result in differences in ethical behavior. A basic instructional challenge is developing the ability of students to understand ethical practice and to facilitate discussion of ethical issues across regional and cultural boundaries. The present project…

A review of the First Year Engineering course sequence at Virginia Tech characterized the current state of ethics education in the program, and informed a strategy to enhance the ethical development of first-year engineering students. This paper reports the results of our initial review of the curriculum, our improvement plan, assessment of our…

The Design Studio is an academic makerspace, housed in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University of Delaware, that was co-developed through a multi-year, grassroots effort by the department and its undergraduate study body. It originated in 2012 in a small, under-utilized study room and evolved in stages into its present form as a 5,500…

In this paper, we provide an overview of the Pathways to Innovation Program (Pathways), a faculty development and institutional change initiative designed to address the adaptive challenge of integrating innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) into undergraduate engineering, nationwide. In particular, we build upon earlier papers that describe…

Implementation of educational innovations on a local scale requires consideration of a variety of different factors including stakeholders, curriculum design, classroom context, and culture. Although theories exist for dimensions of scale and diffusion of educational innovations across multiple institutions, they do not focus on the elements…

Consumer electronics are creating huge job markets for graduates with the programming back-ground, and more and more computer science departments are launching embedded software subjects to meet this demand. However, most students majoring computer science do not have the background in electronics, or even circuits. Due to this reason, how to…

In this paper we examine a case study of a pedagogical strategy that focuses on the teaching of modeling as a habit of mind and practice for novice designers engaged in engineering design challenges. In an engineering design course, pre-service teachers created modeling artifacts in the form of conceptual models, graphical models, mathematical…

As engineering programs have begun to infuse sustainability into their undergraduate curricula, assessment tools are needed to further inform these reform efforts. The goal of this project was to demonstrate the use of a new rubric to examine students' abilities to engage in sustainable design. The rubric includes 16 sustainable design criteria…

Because many engineering programs use capstone design courses and value strong communication abilities, authors sought to identify how student written communication skills changed because of industry-sponsored capstone design projects. A student exit survey was collected at the end of the capstone design course during faculty-led projects and…

Flipped classrooms support learner-centered approaches to improve conceptualization, comprehension, and problem solving skills by delivering content outside the classroom and actively engaging students inside the classroom. While literature in engineering and science education supports and encourages the use of inverted instruction, many core…

This article explores challenges and opportunities associated with sharing qualitative data in engineering education research. This exploration is theoretically informed by an existing framework of interpretive research quality with a focus on the concept of Communicative Validation. Drawing on practice anecdotes from the authors' work, the…

Sharing longitudinal student record data and merging data from different sources is critical to addressing important questions being asked of higher education. The Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) is a multi-institution, longitudinal, student record level dataset that is used to answer…