Sustainability, enhancement of personal skills, social aspects of technology, management and entrepreneurship are of increasing concern for engineers and therefore for engineering education. In 1996 at Delft University of Technology this led to the introduction of a subject on sustainable entrepreneurship and technology in the course programmes of…

Even in self-organized project-based learning, the instructors' role re-mains critical, especially in the initial orientation provided to the students in order to grasp the educational goals and the various roles they may undertake to achieve them. In this paper we survey a few questions proposed to that purpose in a web-based software engineering…

The Mobius strip, torus, and Klein bottle are used to graphically and analytically illustrate the differences between orientable and non-orientable surfaces. An exercise/laboratory project using the non-orientable Boy surface is included. (Contains 11 figures.)

It is essential for students to think clearly about fundamental biological concepts. One of the benefits of writing is that it promotes and enhances thinking. If students can write clearly, they are thinking clearly. Writing helps to connect new knowledge with prior knowledge and promotes the construction of knowledge. Writing-to-learn activities…

This article describes Bob Montgomery's Famous Kindergarten First Graders! project. The aim of the project is to assist his students in learning about each other, to introduce them to digital photography using iPhoto (they participate in a group lesson in editing as well), and to introduce them to moviemaking using iMovie software. The project…

This article describes the Cornell Science Challenge, an annual science fair held at Olin Hall at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. This science fair features seventh graders from East Middle School in New York who have been mentored for three months by actual scientists (graduate students, faculty members, laboratory technicians, and…

Students frequently struggle when scientific instruction seems divorced from personal experience, especially in the physical sub-disciplines, like climatology, where exercise books often present historical or abstracted case studies. In contrast I present a three-phase project involving student input on experimental design, data collection, and…

In our rapidly changing global culture, students' social worlds are becoming increasingly multilingual and multimodal, yet school practices do not often reflect the complexities or diversity of students' literacy and language practices. Valuing students' experiences with language and culture is important in creating supportive learning…

This paper introduces several hands-on projects that have been used to motivate students in learning various computer networking concepts. These projects are shown to be very useful and applicable to the learners' daily tasks and activities such as emailing, Web browsing, and online shopping and banking, and lead to an unexpected byproduct,…

Project TIES (Technology Integration Enhancing Science), a four-year K-8 Technology Literacy Challenge project, combined technology as a tool for teaching and learning with earth and environmental science education. This project provided teachers in two North Carolina school systems with professional development as well as technology equipment and…

This paper explores the extent to which students and teachers are able to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of a shift in the approach to teaching and learning from a traditional, teacher-centred perspective towards project- and learner-centred education. It reports on a case study aimed at exploring students' and teachers' perceptions of a…

The focus of this paper is students' design productions as they engaged in designing and making a windmill model to lift a given weight. This work is part of a project on the development of design and technology (D&T) education units and its trials among Indian middle school students (Grade 6, age 11-14 years) in different socio-cultural…

In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14-18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students' learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course…

Collaborations between business and academia provide valuable opportunities for students to connect classroom learning with practical work experience. To effectively reach a significant number of students, one approach is to meld a real-world business project and classroom assignment into a realistic business scenario that can be addressed by…

A podcast is audio or visual content that is automatically delivered over a network via free subscription. The advantage podcasts have over traditional oral reports is that students can edit and revise until what they say and how they say it is perfected. iLife applications are ideal for creating podcasts and other digital projects because of…