The United States is facing a crisis in terms of meeting demands for a highly skilled technical workforce. Workforce preparation must begin in primary and secondary educational settings. Teachers are perfectly positioned to increase student awareness of and interest in careers in engineering and technology; unfortunately, they are often not well…

This paper describes two case studies where problem-based learning (PBL) has been introduced to undergraduate civil engineering students in University College Dublin. PBL has recently been put in place in the penultimate and final year transport engineering classes in the civil engineering degree in University College Dublin. In this case study,…

The underrepresentation of women in engineering is well known and unresolved. However, Turkey has witnessed a shift in trend from virtually no female participation in engineering to across-the-board proportions that dominate other industrialised countries within the 76 years of the founding of the Turkish Republic. This paper describes the largest…

This paper describes the design of the curriculum for a Master of Engineering programme in civil engineering at University College Dublin. The revised programme was established to meet the requirements of the Bologna process and this paper specifically considers the design of a new, second-cycle master's component of the programme. In addition to…

During the phase of developing new technologies and models to be used in education and for their integration, not only the technical studies and research but also the human factor which is a significant factor for the education system should be taken into consideration. Hence, a reflection concerning the answer to the question of "To what…

Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are realistic, open-ended, client-driven engineering problems designed to foster students' mathematical modeling abilities. Since 2005, the MEAs used in Purdue University's first-year engineering core course have included a double-blind peer review wherein individuals in the course (peers) are randomly assigned a…

Increasing complexity and competitiveness in research environments, the prevalence of interdisciplinary and international involvement in research projects, and the close coupling of commerce and academia have created an ethically challenging environment for young scientists and engineers. For the past several decades, federal research agencies…

A project-based design course is developed for man-portable power generation via microfabricated fuel cell systems. Targeted audience are undergraduate chemical/process engineering students in their final year. The course covers 6 weeks, with three hours of lectures per week. Two alternative projects are developed, one focusing on selection of…

A microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) laboratory course (MEMSlab) in the Mechanical and Process Engineering Department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), is presented. The course has been taught for four years and has been attended primarily by Master's students from mechanical and electrical engineering; since fall…

This paper suggests a pedagogical approach to teaching the subject of the analysis of feedback amplifiers for electrical engineering students at the undergraduate level. Special attention is given to derivation of the input and output impedances. In order to make the procedure clear and suitable for classroom presentation an alternative proof of…

A comparison of the engineering schools at UC Berkeley and Stanford during the 1940s and 1950s shows that having an excellent academic program is necessary but not sufficient to make a university entrepreneurial (an engine of economic development). Key factors that made Stanford more entrepreneurial than Cal during this period were superior…

A single equation of state (EOS) such as the Peng-Robinson (PR) EOS can accurately describe both the liquid and vapor phase. We present several applications of this equation of state, including estimation of pure component properties and computation of the vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) diagram for binary mixtures. We perform high-pressure…

Computer programming in undergraduate engineering education all too often begins and ends with the freshman programming course. Improvements in computer technology and curriculum revision have improved this situation, but often at the expense of the students' learning due to the use of commercial "black box" software. This paper describes the…

Over recent years, universities have been incorporating sustainable development (SD) into their systems, including their curricula. This article analyses the incorporation of SD into the curricula of chemical and environmental engineering or technology bachelor degrees at universities in the European Union (EU) and European Free Trade Association…

Branch mispredicts have a first-order impact on the performance of integer applications. Control Independence (CI) architectures aim to overlap the penalties of mispredicted branches with useful execution by spawning control-independent work as separate threads. Although control independent, such threads may consume register and memory values…