The use of CO[subscript 2] laser cutters/engravers in technology and engineering education "allows even beginning students to produce professional parts in a very short time [and] empowers and motivates students, helping to bring out their creativity" (Flowers, 2000, p. 11). They are fast, accurate, fun to use, and they facilitate…

Purpose: Considering the requirements of sustainable development regarding professionals training and the challenges evidenced during Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, this study aims to contribute to the debates regarding the need to insert sustainability into engineering education in the current context. Design/methodology/approach: For…

Undergraduate engineering education must train students to not only solve design challenges that transcend disciplinary boundaries, but also communicate, transfer knowledge, and collaborate across technical and non-technical boundaries. One approach to achieving this goal is teaching bio-inspired design (BID) in an engineering curriculum. In…

Biomimicry is a useful method to develop students' skills, such as design and systems thinking, particularly when complemented with inquiry-based learning. The research seeks to uncover how students engage in the biomimicry process and what types of designs they produce to reveal insights that could assist educators in teaching biomimicry. A study…

Engineering plays a crucial role in everyday life and is the backbone of growth and development of the world including Mauritius. To embrace development, higher education institutions have to ensure that students are equipped with appropriate knowledge and skills to meet the needs of the country. Unfortunately, data shows that there is an…

This paper presents the implementation of a learning methodology following a student-centred approach. The methodology is based on the use of project based and cooperative learning and mainly consists of commissioning students to prepare a presentation on a topic of their subject. Students work in groups, and later must deliver a real lecture to…

With the unprecedented crisis created by the Coronavirus pandemic, online teaching and learning became a global solution - embraced by the whole world - that tried to cover, at least in part, in part the problems encountered by the educational systems. An exclusively online format of teaching and learning proved to be a challenge for both the…

A critical evaluation was performed comparing final course grades earned by dual-degree STEM students with their peers in the corresponding single-degree programs. The goal was to understand if students in a dual-degree STEM program can obtain grades comparable to their single program peers. There is no published analysis on how the final course…

In the light of Bandura's (Social foundations of thought and action: a social cognitive perspective, Princeton-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1986) social cognitive theory (SCT), we investigated the roles of four different entrepreneurial factors: entrepreneurial qualities (EQ), entrepreneurial knowledge (EK), perceived entrepreneurialism (PE) and…

We discuss classroom activity comprised of small groups of students collaboratively tinkering with programs of dynamically manipulable figural models, posing problems regarding their mathematical properties and behaviors. We analyzed data from students' discourse taken from two classroom interventions employing a framework of creative mathematical…

Background: Supporting undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been a persistent need. However, assessing the impact of support efforts can prove challenging as it is difficult to operationalize student support and subsequently monitor the combined impacts of the various supports to which students…

With the growing attention to the effective use of social network analysis in explaining student learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, the authors explore why college students share knowledge and how they achieve their learning in a laboratory class. In particular, the authors investigate how the social…

Design interviews with stakeholders are an important source of information that engineering designers can use to identify stakeholder needs and develop solutions that meet stakeholder requirements. However, engineering students often struggle to conduct effective design interviews. In this study, we investigated changes in engineering students'…

The increasingly complex socio-technical and economic challenges of our time place considerable pressure on engineering programmes. To ensure that graduates are well-prepared to address these challenges requires curriculum developers to select the appropriate knowledge for the engineering programme. A number of key theorists, notably from the…

This article provides a critical review of the current studies in VR-based health and safety training, assessment techniques, training evaluation, and its potential to improve the training evaluation outcomes in various high-risk engineering industries. The results of this analysis indicate the breadth of VR-based applications in training users on…