Incorporating engineering concepts into middle school curriculum is seen as an effective way to improve students' problem-solving skills. A selection of findings is reported from a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-based unit in which students in the second year (grade 8) of a three-year longitudinal study explored…

This paper introduces the use of a flexible and affordable educational robot specifically developed for the practical experimentation inherent to technological disciplines. The robot has been designed to be reconfigurable and extendible, serving as an experimental platform across several undergraduate courses. As most students have a mobile cell…

This paper reports on a state-of-the-art remote laboratory project called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). VISIR allows wiring and measuring of electronic circuits remotely on a virtual workbench that replicates physical circuit breadboards. The wiring mechanism is developed by means of a relay switching matrix connected to a PCI…

Requirements engineering is one of the fundamental knowledge areas in software and systems engineering graduate curricula. Recent changes in educational delivery and student demographics have created new challenges for requirements engineering education. In particular, there is an increasing demand for online education for working professionals.…

Brazil has developed an encompassing system for quality assessment of higher education, the National System of Higher Education Evaluation (SINAES), which includes a test for assessing learning outcomes at the undergraduate level, the National Exam of Student Performance (ENADE). The present system has been running since 2004, and also serves as…

Little is known about the research characteristics of past women studies in engineering education. In order to add knowledge base about the advanced development of women studies in current engineering education research, the purpose of the study is to investigate research characteristics of past women studies published in three referred…

This paper presents a series of novel project-based learning labs for an introductory robotics course that are developed into a semester-long Robotic Decathlon. The last three events of the Robotic Decathlon are used as three final one-week-long project tasks; these replace a previous course project that was a semester-long robotics competition.…

Haptic paddles--low-cost one-degree-of-freedom force feedback devices--have been used with great success at several universities throughout the US to teach the basic concepts of dynamic systems and physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) to students. The ETHZ haptic paddle was developed for a new pHRI course offered in the undergraduate…

The aim of the study was to investigate senior engineering students' opinions on how the delivery of mathematics courses can be improved. A survey designed by the researcher was conducted on 605 (119 female, 486 male) prospective engineers to obtain feedback on how the mathematics courses they had taken in the engineering departments could have…

This paper reports on the systematic development of a teaching methodology for two chemical engineering courses. The aim was to improve the quality of teaching to achieve expected learning outcomes more effectively. The development was carried out over a period of several years based on an action research methodology with data systematically…

The National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program (NSF, 2012) supports partnerships between K-12 school districts and institutions of higher education (IHEs) and has been funding projects to improve STEM education in K-12 since 2002. As of 2011, a total of 178 MSP projects have received support as part of a STEM…

Mentzer and Becker (2011) and Becker and Mentzer (2012) demonstrated that high school students engaged in engineering design problems spent more time accessing information and spent more time designing when provided with Internet access. They studied high school students engaged in an engineering design challenge. The two studies attempted to…

Afterschool programs are currently conceptualized in two ways. One is represented by "expanded learning," which includes a wide range of content-rich opportunities in the hours outside of school, including summer camps. The operating assumption is that, in structured out-of-school time (OST) programs, children can learn concepts or develop…

While women's participation in math and physical science continues to lag to some degree behind that of men, the disparity is much greater in engineering and computer science. Though boys may outperform girls at the highest levels on math and science standardized tests, girls tend to get better course grades in math and science than boys do.…

Higher education systems around the globe are experimenting with different strategies to foster internationalization and networking, achieve critical research mass, and strengthen innovation and labour market integration. This paper discusses how Portugal, since 2006, has pursued a distinctive international collaborative strategy to induce…