Educating, Enlightening, and Entertaining: Audience Perceptions of the Educational Value of a Presentation Competition for Engineering Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Educating, Enlightening, and Entertaining: Audience Perceptions of the Educational Value of a Presentation Competition for Engineering StudentsLike many of our colleagues at ASEE, the authors of this paper believe that showcasing the ideas and presentation skills of our engineering students benefits both the presenters and the audience.More of the world needs to know about the valuable work our engineering students -future engineers -are doing.And their messages are best delivered by the engineering students themselves.They can educate, enlighten, and entertain their audiences -even about challenging technical topics, from accessible water treatment for developing countries to the potential of quantum computing.At the authors' post-secondary institution, one place engineering students have had the opportunity to educate, enlighten, and entertain is at Presentation Idol for Engineering Students (aka 'Idol'), a presentation competition that has run at the author's postsecondary institution since the spring of 2011.This competition is one of several other innovative events in North America that showcase the technical knowledge and presentation skills of engineering students.Overbaugh et al. 1 provide an excellent summary of these events.Previously, we surveyed participants about what motivated them to compete in Idol 2 .Our next step was to survey audience members, and this paper describes the survey results.Engineering students and faculty members in the audience were asked about their perceptions of the educational value of the competition for both the competitors and the audience members.They were also asked about their perceptions of the personal characteristics of the competitors.As this research project was funded through an Instructional Enhancement Grant, the goal was to examine the perceived educational value of Idol.This examination aims to help identify ways learning and teaching areand can be further -enhanced through Idol.Overall, the results of the survey pointed to an overwhelmingly positive response to the presentation competition and the educational value it provides.The engineering students and faculty surveyed were impressed by the presentation skills and the technical knowledge of the presenters.They were also inspired by the presentation strategies and ideas presented.At the same time, the students in the audience personally identified with the presenters and were encouraged by seeing "students just like us" presenting so competently.These results will help us capitalize on the educational value of the competition as well as provide directions for future research. What is Presentation Idol?Presentation Idol is held every spring at the institute's main campus.Students in any engineering discipline -degree or diploma program -can register to compete for $3,300 in prizes.Participation in Idol is voluntary and not connected to any courses.However, one of the entry criteria is that participants must have taken a Communication course at the institute within the last five years.In their Communication courses, students get Page 26.571.2
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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 | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".