PIs: Jeff Connor, Assistant Professor, Division of Engineering Fundamentals, Richard Goff, Associate Professor, Division of Engineering Fundamentals

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "The stated goals were to introduce engineering through a more hands-on, self-learning type environment. Traditionally, its been a lecture course where they read the material and they are lectured, helped them along with their own self discovery."
Project Grants and Expenditures: $20,000 (year 8), $15,000 (year 9), faculty wages, graduate assistants



Rationale for and description of eight hands-on activities
(Article published in 2001 ASEE Proceedings, Goff & Connor)

Rationale for hands-on activities and results of a survey evaluating student motivation and learning
(Article published in 2001 ASEE Proceedings, Connor & Goff)

 


This project was a pilot in eight of the 36 Engineering Fundamentals 1015 sections (32 students per section). Starting in Fall 2001, the hands-on activities will be integrated into all sections of EF 1015. The hands-on activities take place in the actual classroom, not a laboratory facility, which is what distinguishes this project from project ST 3-1.

Eight hands-on projects were created for students. "We try to … develop activities that can be accomplished in 20 minutes time… rather than… teach precision and units to new engineers [by] lecture from the book. So what we do now is we now give them a somewhat geometrically complex block of wood, and then we say in class… measure this, …weigh it, … sketch it, and then your homework assignment is to go back and from this data … we want you in your dorms to talk about the precision, how well was the object, to what degree was the object, to what precision was the object manufactured? To what degree and to what precision were you able to measure the object? Now find things such as the density, compute the specific weight and manipulate all these units." "…a typical class would be homework review for 10 minutes, quiz for ten minutes, hands on for 20 minutes, what am I up to, and then 10 minutes of lecture…." "…one goal was to keep everything as simple as possible so the equipment we use is standard tape measure, postal scale, yard stick."