We have developed a university entrepreneurship program, culminating in a prototype and business plan, with five objectives: (1) value for all academic participants' (2) introduction to engineering issues for students; (3) refinement of engineering students' "soft" skills; (4) training for students in creating value out of embryonic ideas; and (5)…

Primary objective: To examine perceptions of academic quality and approaches to studying in students taking six technology courses by distance education. Research design: Students taking four courses received an end-of-course questionnaire. The following year, students taking all six courses received a mid-course questionnaire. Method: The Course…

A questionnaire is developed to gauge the disposition of students towards either an incremental (malleable) or entity (fixed) view of intelligence. The relationships between this self-belief and views on group work/learning and creativity are also evaluated using the questionnaire. Attention is also given to any relationship which may exist…

This article describes an active learning method for the teaching of physical sciences and mathematics to engineers. After defining the challenges involved in the training of engineers, we shall describe the answers provided by our method, "learning by doing" (named "Apprentissage Par l"Action" in French), by introducing…

The environmental impact of construction activity has gained increasing importance in the last few years and become a key subject for civil engineering education. A survey of Portuguese higher education institutions shows that concern with this topic is mostly directed at the impact of large construction projects and especially focused on their…

The aim of this research was to evaluate and analyse second-year industrial engineering and chemical engineering students prior knowledge of conceptual aspects of "circuit theory". Specifically, we focused on the basic concepts of electric potential and current intensity and on the fundamental relationship between them as expressed by Ohm's law.…

This paper examines a particular methodology of teaching engineering design to undergraduate engineering students, which relies on Lego[R] Mindstorms[TM]. A number of important issues are addressed, including the timing of the design module within the programme, prior knowledge required and assessment components. The module, which has been running…

The increasing number of homeless people is one of the most burning problems of nowadays world. Society has to find the way to fight against it and provide help to those people that have no place to stay. For short-term interventions, the application of the mobile dwelling units seems to be the only possible solution. However, existing mobile…

Most people in higher education believe in continuity, in respecting traditions. That makes it easy to miss the startling changes and compelling opportunities that confront the academic enterprise. In this article, the author presents a few trends that are dramatically altering higher education in New England: (1) more women than men are attending…

Reservoir simulation is one of the core courses in the petroleum engineering curriculum and it requires knowledge and skills in three major disciplines, namely programming, numerical methods and reservoir engineering. However, there were often gaps in the students' readiness to undertake the course, even after completing the necessary…

Academic dishonesty (cheating) has been prevalent on college campuses for decades, and the percentage of students reporting cheating varies by college major. This study, based on a survey of 643 undergraduate engineering majors at 11 institutions, used two parallel hierarchical multiple regression analyses to predict the frequency of cheating on…

Project Lead The Way (PLTW) is thought by some to be the nation's premier program in providing high schools and middle schools with pre-engineering curriculum and linkage to college-level engineering and engineering technology programs. This study examined the infusion of the PLTW pre-engineering curriculum into the well-established technology…

When one mentions the word engineering, most people think immediately of high-tech items such as computers, or large-scale projects such as bridges, buildings, and roads. While these products represent the products of engineering, there are clear challenges to having students work directly on any of these projects in the context of a science…

The evaluation process is very important to identify and recognize the strengths and the weaknesses of graduated students. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the newly graduated civil engineers from the Islamic University of Gaza in Palestine. The methodology was based on questionnaires and informal interview. The…

To resolve the dispute amongst several studies, this research investigated whether the new generation of women engineering majors, who have been better academically prepared and presumably instilled with confidence, still experience lower levels of achievement than male engineering students. This study was framed under Bandura's (1986) triadic…