Engineering Education Innovation

Engineering Education Innovation
As the world continues to change with globalization and technological advances so must engineering education programs. The Engineering Education Innovation research group seeks to understand and improve the total educational experience in order to prepare engineering students for the demands of a changing workplace.

Areas of focus include analyzing student motivation and gain insight into their emotional state as a means to assess the effectiveness of current educational practices. In the process the group is required to shift their methodology from familiar, numerical experiments to more nuanced measurement often employed by social scientists. With their finding the research group will develop curriculum improvement design to increase students' global competency and lifelong learning skills to better prepare graduates for academic and professional work.

Education Innovation

Current research highlights:

Multi-Semester Interwoven Project for Teaching Basic Core STEM Materials Critical to Solving Dynamic System Problems:  A dynamic system project is developed which spans across several semesters and courses to interweave the related science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) material in a coherent fashion to strongly emphasize the interrelationship between course materials that the students perceive as unrelated and disjointed.  The material developed to support the dynamic system project will consist of the overall project description, the individual pieces of the project, multimedia material along with Java and MATLAB scripts as appropriate to help students better understand basic concepts and underlying theory to solve a complete problem.

Alternative Energy Enterprise: Investigation of Battery Separator Oxidation Resistance: Students in the Alternative Energy Enterprise program are investigating Battery Separator Oxidation by completely characterizing battery separator materials and determine reasons for separator decay by analyzing several samples.  They are also investigating oxidation resistance and cross-directional strength of separators and will propose possible alterations of FLEX-SIL® battery separators.