Engaging First Year Students In Engineering Design Through Engineers Without Borders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Engaging First Year Students in Engineering Design through Engineers Without Borders Projects Abstract It is important that first year engineering students learn that the engineering design process involves more than mathematics and physics. To accomplish this, students choose design projects from a variety of disciplines, developed with Engineers Without Borders (Canada) and situated in either a developing country or a remote area of Canada. All projects required, not only a technical solution, but also consideration of ethics, health and safety, economics, and impact on the community. Among the design projects were a rain-water harvesting system and ceramic water filter for villagers in Cambodia and a press for extracting oil and producing biodiesel fuel from seeds of the Jatropha shrub, which grows in West Africa. The impact of this approach on student satisfaction and success is discussed. Introduction A central focus of engineering education is the design process. Our goal as engineering educators is to ensure that graduating engineers have the ability to “design effective solutions that meet societal needs” 1. Traditionally, engineering education is built on a foundation of sciences and mathematics courses, with students taking engineering courses in their upper years, with few students experiencing design outside of a focused course in their discipline. In the 1990’s, in response to accreditation criteria, most engineering schools added a “capstone” design project in the final year. These projects are meant to be complex, have a “real world” flavor, and are often multi-disciplinary. In some cases, there are industrial sponsors and students work closely with practicing engineers. As engineering education has evolved in the last decade, the concept of a “cornerstone” or first- year engineering design project has been added. The goal of these projects is to give students early exposure to the engineering profession2-4, the engineering design process5, and the diversity of engineering disciplines; all while keeping their excitement, enthusiasm, and enjoyment levels high. Teaching first-year students about the engineering approach to problem-solving and design provides them with a framework within which to apply core scientific knowledge and mathematical skills they are acquiring in other courses. As part of our Introduction to Professional Engineering course, small groups of students work together on design projects. Students choose from a set of topics that reflect the diverse engineering disciplines within our faculty. The project descriptions were developed in collaboration with Engineers Without Borders (Canada) and are set in either a developing country or a remote area of Canada. In addition to the technical aspects of the engineering design, the final reports and presentations address considerations such as ethics, healthy and safety, economics, and impact on the community. Design projects included, for example, a rain-water harvesting system, a ceramic water filter, a seed press to extract oil, and a process for converting seed oil into biodiesel fuel in communities such as Lehkbooan, Cambodia and Changnayili, Ghana.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.103 | 0.057 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".