Greenhouses are marvelous devices, allowing one to enjoy the flower spectacle of summer all year round. At night, greenhouses use supplemental heat to keep the fragile plants warm. Over the last 30 years, greenhouse technology has undergone many changes, with the structures being automated and monitored and low-cost plastic structures emerging as…

Building a structure that stands hundreds or thousands of feet in the air incorporates all aspects of the design process. There are clear goals, constraints, and trade-offs. Here the author does his best to describe these three with respect to skyscrapers and then talks about how engineers, in all their wisdom, have dealt with them. (Contains 5…

Integrating livestock into a cropping system by allowing ruminant animals to graze cover crops may yield economic and environmental benefits. The effects of grazing on soil physical properties, soil organic matter, nitrogen cycling and agricultural production are presented in this literature review. The review found that grazing cover crops…

Studies of change in colleges and universities often consider faculty support a key influence on the success of academic reform efforts. Scholars, however, have given relatively little attention to the role of disciplinary environments (e.g., culture, values, and habits of mind) on educational innovation and change. Using data from 1,272 faculty…

Gel electrophoresis is one of the most important tools used in molecular biology and has facilitated the entire field of genetic engineering by enabling the separation of nucleic acids and proteins. However, commercial electrophoresis kits can cost up to $800 for each setup, which is cost prohibitive for most classroom budgets. This article…

This article examines the effectiveness of English language courses offered in the engineering colleges in India. Many engineering graduates in India are found to be unemployable due to their poor communication skills and lack of confidence. There have been a lot of research papers that have reiterated the importance of improving engineering…

Women and underrepresented minorities in traditionally White and male-dominated disciplines tend to report lower learning outcomes than their White peers. Adopting a feminist intersectionality framework, this study looks at the intersections of gender and race to investigate differences in self-assessed learning outcomes in engineering…

A hybrid introductory course was developed and piloted during the Fall 2007 semester in three laptop sections (i.e., all of the students owned and brought laptops to class each day). The online portion of the course included voiced-over content presentations, software demonstrations, and sketching examples as well as online assessments. Sections…

The Bologna process has triggered an important change in the course outline towards a sustainable, transparent and quality-driven European education system. In Belgium, engineering education had to be completely revised. The transformation of the former system, leading to the degree of academic engineer after five years of study, into the typical…

The decline in engineering degree enrolments in many western nations poses a range of challenges that are easy to identify but difficult to address. There have been at least 30 major reports on the issue of engineering enrolments in universities and a great many more on an allied issue, enrolments and achievement in science and maths areas at a…

Product development is the set of activities starting with the perception of a market need and ending in the production and sale of a new product satisfying that need. Broadly speaking, it is a process that should follow a structured methodology, if a certain level of effectiveness and efficacy is envisaged. In the Portuguese industrial…

This special issue of "Advances in Engineering Education" explores recent developments in P-12 Engineering Education. It includes papers devoted to research and practice, and reports some of the most exciting work in the field today. In our Call of Papers, we solicited two types of papers: Research papers and Practice papers. The former…

Authority as a philosophical concept is defined both in general and as it applies to engineering education. Authority is shown to be a good and necessary part of social structures, in contrast to some cultural trends that regard it as an unnecessary and outmoded evil. Technical, educational, and organizational authority in their normal functions…

This article explores how four male vehicle engineering students at an upper secondary school in Sweden engage in literature discussion. The study combines a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach with a reception theory perspective and shows that the boys use direct reported speech (DRS) in their interaction as a technique to handle intimate and…

Engineering graduates of the twenty-first century must be worldly and understand how to work with professionals from many cultures on projects that cross international boundaries. Increasingly, employers are finding that prospective employees who have studied abroad make better, more rounded candidates than those who have no life experience…