Keira Sewell has just finished her second year as a Challenge Leader for the Faraday Challenge, a STEM-based scheme run by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Aimed at 12-13 year-old students, its purpose is to engage students in future careers in engineering. Each year, a new challenge is held in over sixty schools and universities…

This paper reports outcomes of a study focused on discovering qualitatively different ways students experience problem-based learning in virtual space. A well-accepted and documented qualitative research method was adopted for this study. Five qualitatively different conceptions are described, each revealing characteristics of increasingly complex…

Increasing pressure to transform teaching and learning of engineering is supported by mounting research evidence for the value of learner-centered pedagogies. Despite this evidence, engineering faculty are often unsuccessful in applying such teaching approaches often because they lack the necessary knowledge to customize these pedagogies for their…

Undergraduate engineering education in the United States is in need of reform that addresses the recruitment and retention of a diverse population of students. Change Chem is a curriculum reform model that has been created to address this issue for freshman students. This article reports on a mixed method efficacy study of Change Chem, which uses…

Students are seldom given an authentic experience within school that allows them the opportunity to solve real-life complex engineering design problems that have meaning to their lives and/ or the greater society. They are often confined to learning environments that are limited by the restrictions set by course content for assessment purposes and…

Over the past 20 years there have been many changes to the primary and secondary educational system that have impacted students, teachers, and post-secondary institutions across the United States of America. One of the most important is the large number of standardized tests students are required to take to show adequate performance in school.…

This article describes the project-based learning environment created to support project management graduate courses. The paper will focus on the learning context and procedures followed for 13 years, in 47 project-based learning MBA courses, involving approximately 1,400 students and 34 community partners.

In this first of a two-part series, the authors report that STEM is still mostly science and mathematics, taught separately with little or no attention to technology and engineering. Where connections do get made to technology and engineering, too often they happen through several disconnected projects that lack coherence in content standards and…

In educational research, it is well-known that collaborative work on core conceptual issues in physics leads to significant improvements in students' conceptual understanding. In this paper, we explore collaborative learning in action, adding to previous research in engineering education with a specific focus on the students' use of free body…

The use of wind energy is now an established fact, and many educational institutions are introducing this topic into their engineering studies. Problem-based learning (PBL), as a student-centered instructional approach, has contributed to important developments in engineering education over the last few years. This paper presents the experience of…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method where student learning occurs in the context of solving an authentic problem. PBL was initially developed out of an instructional need to help medical school students learn their basic sciences knowledge in a way that would be more lasting while helping to develop clinical skills…

We will present a case study result from a cross-disciplinary education called Medialogy, which is taught in the Technical and Science Faculty at Aalborg University. The aim of Medialogy is to facilitate creativity within technical solutions. The intention of this paper is to answer the following: how do the Medialogy teachers perceive creativity…

Increased attention to the need for constructively aligned teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education in engineering is observed. By contrast, little research has been conducted on the implementation of the outcome-based pedagogical approach to interdisciplinary higher education in engineering. Therefore, the present design-based…

This paper presents the introduction of problem-based learning (PBL) in a power electronics course at the University of Oviedo, Gijon, Spain, by means of two practical projects: the design and construction of a switching-mode power supply (SMPS) prototype and the static study of a dc-dc converter topology. The goal of this innovation was for…

Teaching design to middle and high school students can be challenging. One of the first procedures in teaching design is to help students gather information that will be useful in the design phase. An early stage of engineering design as described by Lewis (2005), calls for the designer to establish the state of the art of the problem. During this…