In many mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculums, there are topics that are vital to the students' future careers in the manufacturing and design workforce that are not taught in-depth. As one of those topics, Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing, or GD&T, is vital to companies who develop and manufacture products because it allows…

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…

The Three Little Pigs launched a lesson in which kindergarten students were challenged with designing a house out of materials such as marshmallows and toothpicks that could withstand the Big Bad Wolf. Students engaged in the engineering design process and geometry standards while building and testing their models.

In this article, the authors explain how they leveraged the popularity of the "Star Wars" franchise to introduce a task steeped in popular culture as a fun way to engage their students in investigating complex mathematics that have real-life connections to careers in toy design and engineering design in general. The authors share various…

Technological advancements are pushing new simulation and analytical tools, driving the research fields in design forward. In this environment, for introducing new modeling, simulation, and analytic tools, the pre-training aspect becomes important, presenting the ideas behind the tools and preparing the students to structure their already grasped…

This case study explores young children's understanding and application of the concept of volume through the practices of engineering design in a STEM activity. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, engineering stands out as a challenging area to implement. In addition, most early engineering education…

Engineering design is known as an answer to an ill-defined problem. As any answer to an ill-defined problem, it can never be completely right or absolutely wrong. The methods that universities use to teach engineering design, as a consequence of this, suffer from the same fate. However, the accumulated experience with the "chalk and…

The ability to rotate visual mental images is a complex cognitive skill. It requires the building of graphical libraries of information through short or long term memory systems and the subsequent retrieval and manipulation of these towards a specified goal. The development of mental rotation skill is of critical importance within engineering…

Using an apparently simple problem, ''Design a cylindrical can that will hold a liter of milk,'' this paper demonstrates how engineering design may facilitate the teaching of the following ideas to secondary students: linear and non-linear relationships; basic geometry of circles, rectangles, and cylinders; unit measures of area and volume;…

These proceedings contain the papers of the International Conference e-Learning 2014, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society and is part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (Lisbon, Portugal July 15-19, 2014). The e-Learning 2014 conference aims to address the…