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- Conference Proceeding
Engineering Leaders World Congress on Engineering Education 2013
- Conference date: 7-9 Jan 2013
- Location: Qatar National Convention Center, Doha, Qatar
- Volume number: 2014
- Published: 01 July 2014
21 - 30 of 30 results
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An investigation into specific skills requiring enhancement in Qatari high school students to succeed in an engineering education
Freshmen students at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), take a compulsory course called “Fundamentals of Engineering I”. It mainly focuses on five engineering principles: problem solving, analysis, design, team work and technology. An investigation of how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are being taught in Qatari high schools was conducted to determine the limitations students have in the aforementioned principles. Surveys of students and teachers from eight Qatari high schools were conducted, and the teaching process was observed in the classrooms. It was detected that the most drawbacks in the investigated engineering principles were team work, design and use of technology. The purpose of this paper is to showcase the major results obtained from the surveys and observations. Possible solutions are suggested in order to increase the exposure of the Qatari high school students to the main engineering principles and hence make them better prepared for college engineering courses.
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Validating the value of industry-university collaborations in graduate engineering education
Authors: Rapinder Sawhney, Sima Maleki and Kaveri ThakurThe Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) program within the Center for Productivity Innovations (CPI) in the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville provides an opportunity for students to utilize industry as a laboratory for learning and developing research ideas. This paper presents an effective educational model being used in ISE-CPI to prepare a new generation of industrial engineering leaders. These young leaders' educational experience is enhanced as they are equipped with the technical, organizational, and social skills necessary for them to tackle global challenges and create value for society. A survey was developed to assess the contribution of the ISE-CPI program (in comparison with other mechanisms of acquiring education) from the students' perspective. The results validate the success of the ISE-CPI program model in combining formal education and career experiences to train effective leaders through industry-related projects.
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Industrial engineers articulate their critical thinking for problem solving via the D.R.I.V.E.S. model
Authors: Rupy Sawhney and Enrique Macias de AndaIndustrial engineers face a challenge to develop sustainable continuous improvement implementations, to help businesses change and adapt to continual survival challenges. Recent industrial engineering graduates face difficulties in structuring their acquired knowledge from an open-ended problem solving perspective. Leadership at Boeing is determined by the ability to define knowledge, model and mentor/teach others that knowledge. By this definition, industrial engineers fall short on their ability to teach others their problem solving process. This paper first provides a framework for a set of attributes, defined to establish the core elements of what industrial engineers must learn, practice and develop for sustainable solutions, to later introduce the D.R.I.V.E.S. model as a structured methodology for continuous improvement, using different industrial engineering tools to narrow down open-ended problems into a sequence of steps to propose the right set of solutions and ensure sustainable improvement implementations.
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The significance of industry experience in civil engineering education
More LessStudents pursuing their civil engineering degree usually learn the theory part in class but may struggle relating theory to practice if the instructor have no industry experience. Engineering graduates can benefit more when civil engineering courses are taught by instructors that have both academic and practical experience. An instructor with industry experience can motivate students, enable them to relate what was learned in the class with the real world, and allow them to start developing their own engineering judgment, which is essential for the successful practice of civil engineering. The paper discusses the importance of practical experience in civil engineering education, problems facing practical teaching, and successful practices in practical teaching.
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Using the case method to transform engineering education
Authors: Massood Towhidnejad, Thomas B. Hilburn and Salamah SalamahOne of the primary objectives of most undergraduate engineering programs is to prepare graduates for engineering practice. Advances in engineering methods and technology, modern system complexity, and the need to work across cultures and time zones have influenced significant change in the practice of engineering. Unfortunately, there has been little change in engineering education to accommodate these changes. In this paper, we propose that engineering educators alter the typical lecture style and instructional activities focused on the individual, and use a team-based case method approach to transform their programs, so that throughout a curriculum teams of students engage in realistic engineering practice activities, centered around a comprehensive life-cycle engineering case study. The authors illustrate this approach with a life-cycle software engineering case study.
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An overview of GRCSE: Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering
Authors: Massood Towhidnejad and Thomas B. HilburnWith the ever increasing complexity of engineered systems, there is a need for educating and training additional systems engineers to meet future demand. Over the last three years, educators and professional systems engineers from around the world have been working on the development of a Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE™), which is scheduled to be released by December 2012. This work has been supported by the US Department of Defense and many international organizations such as the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Systems Council, INCOSE, and ACM.
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The role of internships in a higher education institute
Authors: Achilles Vairis, Kostas Loulakakis and Markos PetousisIndustrial placement or internship is becoming part of an increasing number of higher education courses, ranging from engineering to accounting and social work, in the past decade. The paper analyses internship practice at a technological university in the island of Crete, in the south of Greece, where internships are part of every undergraduate course offered, and documents this experiential-learning process for students, academics and business managers alike. This work details the goals and structural elements of internships and its characteristics relating to employment conditions, and procedures for the academic institution and company alike, and lists the assessment tools of students and the process itself. It also describes the different approach to internships for each of the three stakeholders involved: students, managers and university academic staff, based on the long experience of academic internship supervisors of the institute. The findings of this paper are based on an enhanced internship project that the Greek institute is running and reports preliminary results of this programme. In addition, suggestions are made for future development and monitoring of internship programmes to achieve beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders.
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Training future engineers to be committed to safety
Authors: Luc N. Véchot, Valeria Casson and Tomasz OlewskiHistory has shown at multiple occasions that major incidents in the process industry have the potential to affect the world in different aspects: loss of life and economic losses and environmental disasters. Can the occurrence of major preventable incidents be seriously decreased by investing in better education and research in process safety? This paper will share ideas on how to convey safety as a value to engineering students. Emphasis with be put on making them participants and actors of process safety related activities at early stages of their education in order to work at the development of their safety culture well before the start of their professional life. These activities include their involvement in current research, laboratory activities using specific equipment, long term projects on the study of incident that defined process safety. The integration of process safety principles in other regular engineering courses will also be discussed.
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Competition-driven robot design
Authors: Nuri Yilmazer, Muhittin Yilmaz, Reza Nekovei, Selahattin Ozcelik and Hayder Abdul-RazzakThe study presents a successful methodological robot design approach for the 2011 IEEE Region-5 competition to improve innovation skills of students through a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored project that aimed to develop a laboratory-based, competition-driven robotics curriculum in a minority serving institution.
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How to develop engineering students' problem solving skills using cooperative problem based learning (CPBL)
Authors: Khairiyah Mohd-Yusof, Fatin Aliah Phang and Syed Ahmad HelmiProblem solving has been identified as the top priority attribute in engineering graduates for the 21st century. Nevertheless, the question remains on how to actually develop skills for solving real world problem in engineering students. Cooperative problem based learning (CPBL) has been shown to significantly enhance problem-solving skills among engineering students in a typical course. CPBL is the integration of cooperative learning (CL) in the problem based learning (PBL) cycle to enable efficient and effective implementation in a class of up to sixty students with one instructor acting as a floating facilitator. Research on students' perception of CPBL also showed that while many students may not initially like the drastic change from the usual “spoon-feeding” culture to learning inductively through CPBL, most of them were gradually won over as they go through several problems and CPBL cycles, especially when they realized the enhancement in skills and knowledge that they gained through the technique. This paper puts forth a summary of the research findings on CPBL, and explains how to conduct CPBL in developing and enhancing problem solving skills in engineering students.
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