The fourth industrial revolution and the rise of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial assembly lines are changing the traditional role of human operators in assembly tasks from following a sequence of operations to working together with a cobot and being able to intervene at different stages of the assembly process. Hence, it is important…

This reflective practice contribution presents the lessons learned from teaching plant design using an online flipped format to a small cohort of students in the first COVID-19 semester. These lessons were applied to the online teaching of the capstone design course to a full-sized cohort. The impact of the implemented recommendations on the…

The objective of this study was to examine in what ways and to what extent preschoolers (5-6 years of age) manifest early Engineering Habits of Mind (EHoM) while engaging in an open-ended problem-solving construction task. The study comprised 228 children (120 boys and 108 girls). The study implemented a quantitative approach. The main research…

Israel suffers from a severe STEM teacher shortage. To mitigate it, two retraining projects were developed: one recruiting academic high-tech professionals and the other -- practical engineers. This study evaluated both projects by exploring stakeholders' perspectives and examining graduates' retention. Applying a mixed-methods case study design,…

The discourse on science and engineering education focuses on ways of preparing students, as future employees, and global citizens. While this discourse deals with the purposes and characteristics of engineering education, it tends to neglect the students' perspectives. The purpose of this study was to provide insights into the perspectives of…

Israel has worked to improve the accessibility of its higher education to under-served communities, but lower socioeconomic students, as well as those of certain ethnic backgrounds, remain disadvantaged. Unfortunately, some 'second chance' programs developed to help facilitate admission to higher education have only increased this inequality. The…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to compare the levels of EI of male and female students, EI among students of three different academic faculties: business, engineering and nursing and the degree of change in their EI over the course of study. Additionally, the authors set out to isolate and quantify the effects of gender and field of…

Integrating genetic engineering and molecular biology lab activities into open inquiry-based teaching is an innovative, unique process that has taken place in Israeli high schools since 2018, becoming part of biology studies for 11th- and 12th-grade students. Engaging these students in lab techniques and practices in this field enables them to…

The effect of simulator-triggered team debriefing on team cognition and teamwork was explored in the context of simulator-based training of project management. Specifically, a simulator-generated feedback based on the dynamic state of the simulated project was displayed to students to trigger team debriefing. The experiment took place as part of a…

The student evaluation of teaching (SET) tool is widely used to measure student satisfaction in institutions of higher education. A SET typically includes several criteria, which are assigned equal weights. The motivation for this research is to examine student and lecturer perceptions and the behaviour of the students (i.e. ratings given by them…

Technology-enriched lessons can contribute to improving student engagement and learning in engineering courses. In this study we systematically incorporated Kahoot!, a game-based response system, in two mandatory content-intensive undergraduate engineering courses. In both courses, short quizzes were incorporated regularly at the beginning of the…

Systems thinking and abstract thinking are important skills for engineers in general and hardware and software engineers in particular. Systems thinking emphasises the interdependence of system components and their synergy. Abstract thinking permits one to focus on the significant details of the current perspective, while temporarily neglecting…

Purpose: Research has shown that the much-anticipated technology revolution in higher education has failed to come to fruition. The arrival of 'digital natives' millennial students to higher education was presume to present even greater challenge concerning technology use. In light of these gaps, this research aims to capture higher education…

This study deals with the academic identities of 13 female Arab students upon their entrance to STEM studies in a university in Israel. Female Arab students in a predominantly Jewish Israeli engineering institution face conflicting narratives regarding their ethnicity, gender, and its relation to possible success in university-level studies in…

In this study, we suggest combining the monitoring of actual examination time used with grades in order to assess examination time extensions in terms of access provision and expected outcome. Using naturally-occurring data collected from a large sample (N = 2315) of undergraduate engineering students, we argue that extended examination time may…