Numerical methods to biosystems and food engineering students: Hands-on practices and cross-disciplinary integration

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 1120-1133
Author(s):  
Jose A. Rabi ◽  
Fernando L. Caneppele
Author(s):  
A Gonzalez-Buelga ◽  
I Renaud-Assemat ◽  
B Selwyn ◽  
J Ross ◽  
I Lazar

This paper focuses on the development, delivery and preliminary impact analysis of an engineering Work Experience Week (WEW) programme for KS4 students in the School of Civil, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (CAME) at the University of Bristol, UK. Key stage 4, is the legal term for the two years of school education which incorporate GCSEs in England, age 15–16. The programme aims to promote the engineering profession among secondary school pupils. During the WEW, participants worked as engineering researchers: working in teams, they had to tackle a challenging engineering design problem. The experience included hands-on activities and the use of state-of-the-art rapid prototyping and advanced testing equipment. The students were supervised by a group of team leaders, a diverse group of undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students, technical staff, and academics at the School of CAME. The vision of the WEW programme is to transmit the message that everybody can be an engineer, that there are plenty of different routes into engineering that can be taken depending on pupils’ strengths and interests and that there are a vast amount of different engineering careers and challenges to be tackled by the engineers of the future. Feedback from the participants in the scheme has been overwhelmingly positive.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-145
Author(s):  
Ruth Wiederkehr ◽  
Marie-Thérèse Rudolf von Rohr

This article focuses on how formative feedback can be used to help engineering students write precise and coherent management summaries that appeal to a mixed audience. Management summaries are especially challenging to master as students must strive for a balance between adhering to scientific standards and being intelligible for a wider non-expert readership. Students of Energy and Environmental Technology at the school of engineering (FHNW) in Switzerland write a total of six technical reports about their project work (mostly in German). By analysing two management summaries, the focus is laid on the lecturers’ approach of relying on formative feedback which supports and accompanies the students’ iterative writing processes. It is shown how in early semesters lecturers provide hands-on guidance, such as suggesting discourse markers or pinpointing vague references to sharpen students’ awareness of the need to write as concisely as possible for mixed audiences.


10.29007/6434 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Noceti

Writing is extremely challenging for engineering students. Navarro (2012) asserts that academic literacy in the mother tongue is similar to learning a foreign language as it involves immersion in a new culture. Food Engineering undergraduates (School of Food Science, University of Entre Ríos) face this difficulty when they have to write their Final Project. As a consequence, interdisciplinary actions were implemented by engineers and linguists (both in English and Spanish) in order to raise students´ awareness of this genre characteristics, to facilitate its production and to write relevant titles and abstracts. The importance of both title and abstract is paramount once the Final Projects are uploaded to the university website in order to attract readers. The objective of this study was to explore whether interdisciplinary actions could optimize undergraduates´ written production. All titles produced since the first Food Engineer graduated were collected. This corpus analysis revealed that titles were extremely short and provided very little information. Consequently, pedagogical activities were designed and implemented as from 2012. An exploration of antecedent or prior genre knowledge (Artemeva, N. & Fox., J., 2010) was carried out in different workshops. Generic structure, audience awareness, rhetorical functions and linguistic features studied in the English courses were activated. Writing seminars in Spanish were implemented in 5º year. In addition, undergraduates attended tutorials with the engineers and then and then interviews with the linguists. In several meetings students discussed titles and abstracts (in Spanish and English), designed their slides for the oral defense and rehearsed their oral presentations. The analysis of the corpus including all projects´ titles defended within the time window that included our actions indicated that students had activated their previous generic knowledge. Feedback from students, after graduation, demonstrated that interdisciplinary activities included language as an across the curriculum content and contributed to the adequate production of academic genres. Results may affect curricular design and decisions at the macro level since implementation of writing seminars along undergraduates´ trajectories has been positioned as a top priority.


Author(s):  
Gordana Collier ◽  
Andy Augousti ◽  
Andrzej Ordys

The continual development of technology represents a challenge when preparing engineering students for future employment. At the same time, the way students interact in everyday life is evolving: their extra-curricular life is filled with an enormous amount of stimulus, from online data to rich Web-based social interaction. This chapter provides an assessment of various learning technology-driven methods for enhancing both teaching and learning in the science and engineering disciplines. It describes the past, present, and future drivers for the implementation of hands-on teaching methods, incorporating industry standard software and hardware and the evolution of learning experiments into all-encompassing online environments that include socializing, learning, entertainment, and any other aspect of student life when studying science and engineering.


2019 ◽  
pp. 801-823
Author(s):  
Gordana Collier ◽  
Andy Augousti ◽  
Andrzej Ordys

The continual development of technology represents a challenge when preparing engineering students for future employment. At the same time, the way students interact in everyday life is evolving: their extra-curricular life is filled with an enormous amount of stimulus, from online data to rich Web-based social interaction. This chapter provides an assessment of various learning technology-driven methods for enhancing both teaching and learning in the science and engineering disciplines. It describes the past, present, and future drivers for the implementation of hands-on teaching methods, incorporating industry standard software and hardware and the evolution of learning experiments into all-encompassing online environments that include socializing, learning, entertainment, and any other aspect of student life when studying science and engineering.


Author(s):  
Zol Bahri Razali ◽  
James Trevelyan

Empirical studies suggest that practical intelligence acquired in engineering laboratories is valuable in engineering practice and could also be a useful learning outcome that is a result from a laboratory experience. To prove this, the author started a project to understand further about the practical learning outcomes from traditional laboratory classes. When tools used by psychologists were applied to measure practical intelligence in an electronics laboratory class, not only could a significant gain in hands-on practical intelligence be measured, but students’ ability to diagnose equipment faults could also be predicted. For the first time, therefore, the author can demonstrate that there are real advantages inherent in hands-on laboratory classes, and supported by Outcome Based Education (OBE) method, it is possible to measure this advantage. It is possible that measurements of practical intelligence may reveal new and more powerful ways for students to acquire practical knowledge. The results firstly demonstrate the ability to devise effective ways to assess the outcomes of practical intelligence acquired by engineering students from their laboratory experiences. The results from the study show that the score on practical intelligence outcomes is proportional with the outcomes of the ability in diagnosing equipment faults. Therefore, the novel results suggest that practical intelligence scores predict the ability to diagnose experiment faults for similar laboratory equipment.


2022 ◽  
pp. 271-289
Author(s):  
Violeta Meneses Carvalho ◽  
Cristina S. Rodrigues ◽  
Rui A. Lima ◽  
Graça Minas ◽  
Senhorinha F. C. F. Teixeira

Engineering education is a challenging topic that has been deeply explored in order to provide better educational experiences to engineering students, and the learning by doing approach has been appraised. Amidst a global pandemic, an engineering summer program denominated i9Masks emerged and aimed to create transparent facial masks for preventing the virus spreading. This project had the participation of 21 students from different engineering areas, as well as professors and monitors whose guidance and commitment were of great importance for its success. Aiming to understand the importance of this engineering hands-on project for students' training, two inquiries were applied, being one for students and the other for professors and monitors/researchers. Students described this initiative as an amazing and innovative experience that they would like to repeat and considered useful for their careers. Regarding the impact perceived by the teaching staff, the results proved that they enjoyed participating in the i9MASKS project and sharing knowledge with students in a practical way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (24) ◽  
pp. 9070
Author(s):  
Hugo Torres-Salinas ◽  
Juvenal Rodríguez-Reséndiz ◽  
Adyr A. Estévez-Bén ◽  
M. A. Cruz Pérez ◽  
P. Y. Sevilla-Camacho ◽  
...  

This research focused on developing a methodology that facilitates the learning of control engineering students, specifically developing skills to design a complete control loop using fuzzy logic. The plant for this control loop is a direct current motor, one of the most common actuators used by educational and professional engineers. The research was carried out on a platform developed by a group of students. Although the learning techniques for the design and implementation of controllers are extensive, there has been a delay in teaching techniques that are relatively new compared to conventional control techniques. Then, the hands-on laboratory offers a tool for students to acquire the necessary skills in driver tuning. In addition to the study of complete systems, the ability to work in a team is developed, a fundamental skill in the professional industrial area. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of student learning was carried out, integrating a multidisciplinary project based on modern tools.


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