The Engineers in Action (EIA) Bridge Program provides engineering students with international service-learning opportunities through design-build footbridge projects. The conventional project model relies on an implementation trip as a primary learning activity. Prior to the pandemic-caused cancellations of all implementation trips in 2020, EIA…

In this work, the online offering of a sophomore electrical and computer engineering hands-on course at UC Davis during COVID-19 pandemic is discussed. In response to California's social distancing guidelines, the course was abruptly moved from in-person to remote instruction. To overcome the challenges inherent in remote instruction, we employed…

To provide a project-based learning experience during the COVID-19 outbreak, we mailed experimental kits to 285 undergraduate students and developed curriculum for a multi-player online robot simulation game. Students successfully achieved cognitive objectives and rated the remote learning experience comparably to the prior-year in-person…

This paper presents two reflection activities that supported the creation of community and a sense of caring for students learning in an online environment in the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first activity, students indicated how they were feeling in terms of hope/despair, stress/calm and energy level in a "check-in" slide at the beginning…

As schools were ordered to close due to the COVID-19 pandemic, K-12 teachers were given little time to prepare and make the transition to a remote environment. STEM teachers have the added challenge of converting lab-based activities into a virtual format. To determine how K-12 teachers can best be supported to provide distance lab-based…

In this paper, we focus on resolving three key challenges during COVID-19 distance learning: engagement, understanding, and assessment. In particular, as a case study for an undergraduate Engineering calculus course, we develop the Desmos activities and the Think Alouds to provide effective solutions for these challenges.

The Charles Sturt University (CSU) Engineering programme is a new course (degree programmme) established in 2016 by a university that had not previously taught engineering. This start from scratch occasion was taken as an opportunity to build an all-new programme structure and philosophy. Students at CSU Engineering complete a sequence of three…

Challenges posed to the online classes during the COVID-19 epidemic, which prevented instant face-to-face communication and forced physical separation, were tentatively resolved by a teaching strategy shift to foster and improve student self-study skills. Class slides, teaching formats, as well as learning activities were redesigned and…

Faculty at Rice University are creating instructional resources to support teaching first-year engineering design using a flipped classroom model. This implementation of flipped pedagogy is unusual because content-driven, lecture courses are usually targeted for flipping, not project-based design courses that already incorporate an abundance of…

Situated cognition theory describes the context of a learning activity's effect on learner's cognition. In this paper, we use situated cognition theory to examine the effect of product dissection on product redesign activities. Two specific research questions are addressed: 1) Does situated cognition, in the form of product dissection, improve…

Traditional instructional materials such as textbooks contain significant educational content, but the navigational mechanisms to access that content are limited and, more importantly, not designed with learning in mind. To address this gap, we present the Adaptive Map, a novel organization and navigation tool designed to help students better…

Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites widely serve as the first major research gateway for undergraduates seeking a structured research experience. Given their lack of prior research skills, and the highly compressed duration of the REU programs, these students frequently encounter barriers to a seamless transition into a new…

Learning-by-teaching is a pedagogical approach grossly underused in the education of engineers at all levels. The existing learning-by-teaching literature across all disciplines was reviewed with the intent of formally presenting this teaching method to engineering educators. The review defines learning-by-teaching, presents theoretical support…

Studio STEM adopts a design studio model to provide middle school youth with the opportunity to work with peers and college student facilitators after school in a relaxed, non-threatening, collaborative environment. Two informal learning educators guided overall instruction and pacing, but youth directed their own step-by-step activities by…

In 2004, a group of engineering and education faculty at Virginia Tech received a major curriculum reform and engineering education research grant under the department-level reform (DLR) program of the NSF. This DLR project laid the foundation of sponsored research in engineering education in the Department of Engineering Education. The DLR…