BME HealthReach is an educational outreach program where undergraduate BME students participate in an out-of-class design thinking course to create and teach interactive STEM activities to K-12 students, where children with chronic illnesses are the primary clients. We detail research that seeks to answer the following: (1) what impact does this…

This work-in-progress research paper examines the relationship between two aspects of students' engagement and academic performance. With the boom of technology-mediated learning environments, many educational applications are integrated into STEM courses. However, the effectiveness of these applications in the learning environments is contingent…

The paper explores the effectiveness of hands-on learning (HOL) as a student-centered model to train first year chemical engineering undergraduates. The pedagogical design of the course uses laboratory sessions, lectures, reflection sessions, projects, and assessments to achieve the course learning outcomes. The adopted assessment methodology…

As national STEM initiatives focus on engineering design as a STEM integrator, a more important concern for K-12 educators should be teaching design fundamentals and using these experiences to help students obtain STEM content knowledge. There appears however, to be little instruction and emphasis on building students' design-sketching skills in…

The Laplace transform is an important tool in many branches of engineering, for example, electric and control engineering, but is also regarded as a difficult topic for students to master. We have interviewed 22 university teachers from five universities in three countries (Mexico, Spain and Sweden) about their views on relationships among…

Engineering design places unique demands on teachers, as students are coming up with new, unanticipated ideas to problems along often unpredictable trajectories. These demands motivate a responsive approach to teaching, in which teachers attend their students' thinking and flexibly adapt their instructional plans and objectives. A great deal of…

The first steps in the engineering design process are to identify and define the problem (Eide, Jenison, Mashaw, & Northup, 2001). The primary purpose of this article is to highlight the problem that has existed for the past three decades (a disconnect between industrial educators and proponents of technological literacy) and to make a…

There is little doubt that student motivation is essential in providing a beneficial learning experience. One way to produce such motivation is to stimulate it through suitable assessment methods. This paper shares the experience acquired by the authors, who are university lecturers in Civil Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,…

This concluding commentary takes the perspective of research on practicing scientists and engineers to consider what open areas and future directions on relational thinking and learning should be considered beyond the impressive research presented in the special issue. Areas for more work include (a) a need to examine educational applications of…

This paper describes a web-based suite of simulation games that have the purpose to enhance the chemical engineering curriculum with business-oriented decisions. Two simulation cases are discussed whose teaching topics include closing material and energy balances, importance of recycle streams, price-volume relationship in a dynamic market, impact…

Curriculum reform is a key topic in the engineering education literature, but much of this discussion proceeds with little engagement with the impact of the local context in which the programme resides. This article thus seeks to understand the influence of local contextual dynamics on curriculum reform in engineering education. The empirical…

Purpose: Our findings show that the academic culture is base for quality teaching and education delivery and it impacts employee experience through employee involvement in decision-making and employee engagement demonstrating benefits for universities such as increased employee attraction, higher retention, greater productivity and improved…

This report evaluates the use of active, open-ended research problems taken from the instructor's laboratory and assigned as mid-semester projects in Transport Phenomena. Projects are structured in a POGIL [process oriented guided inquiry learning] format and designed to engage students by providing them the opportunity to impact real research…

Student performance evaluations are a traditional method for assessing a student's skills during a work-integrated learning (WIL) experience. While these assessments provide students with feedback on the development of their skills, little documentation of student performance exists after the WIL experience. This paper explores the role of…

During the coronavirus pandemic, there have been significant challenges in the remote teaching and demonstration of experiments, especially those that require laboratory testing equipment. With a desire to give students a feel for our materials laboratory on open days and allow them to gain a deeper understanding of what materials science and…