The EPICS Program was created in 1995 with the dual purposes of improving engineering education and addressing compelling needs within our communities. The model broke with many traditional academic traditions, involving students in multidisciplinary teams of students from first-year to fourth years for multiple semesters or even years on projects…

In light of both social and ABET expectations, engineering educators need to consider how to effectively infuse engineering ethics education into current engineering curricula. This article describes our initial efforts in that realm. We considered how to improve ethics education in engineering through establishing an academic-industry…

Purdue University's commitments as a public land grant institution that purposefully integrates education, research, and service has enabled the university to develop as a site of innovation and impact at scale, making strategic investments and taking bold risks that produce benefits within wider social, political, and economic systems. We present…

This research studies the positive and negative perceptions of graduate students from the United States studying issues of sustainable electronics and electronics manufacturing in India as part of a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the…

A significant body of research identifies a large number of team composition characteristics that affect the success of individuals and teams in cooperative learning and project-based team environments. Controlling these factors when assigning students to teams should result in improved learning experiences. However, it is very difficult for…

Compared to the learning that occurs in most engineering courses, the learning that occurs in design courses is more dependent on students, and less dependent on instructors. Because typical course evaluations are instructor-centric and do not provide information about students' contributions to their learning, we developed a supplemental…

We studied the use of online molecular dynamics simulations (MD) to enhance student abilities to understand the atomic processes governing plastic deformation in materials. The target population included a second-year undergraduate engineering course in the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. The objectives of the study were to…

Between 2006 and 2010, sophomore engineering students at four universities were exposed to technologies designed to increase their learning in undergraduate engineering courses. Our findings suggest that students at all sites found the technologies integrated into their courses useful to their learning. Video solutions received the most positive…

Engineering education directly supports the nation's capacity for economic growth, infrastructure renewal, and security, as well as environmental and human health. Numerous reports have recommended federal support to advance our understanding of how students learn, how faculty teach, and how teaching and learning are assessed. The U.S. National…

Proper understanding of scaling and large-scale hydrologic processes is often not explicitly incorporated in the teaching curriculum. This makes it difficult for students to connect the effect of small scale processes and properties (like soil texture and structure, aggregation, shrinkage, and cracking) on large scale hydrologic responses (like…