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Instructional Use of Computers in a Hands-on Programming Course for First-Year Engineering Students

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

First-Year Programs: Work in Progress Postcard Session

Tagged Division

First-Year Programs

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32976

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/32976

Download Count

375

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Paper Authors

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Janet K. Lumpp University of Kentucky

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Dr. Janet Lumpp is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Kentucky and Director of the First-Year Engineering Program in the UK College of Engineering.

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Jennifer Lovely University of Kentucky

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Dr. Jennifer Lovely is a Lecturer for the First Year Engineering Program at the University of Kentucky from the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering. She has two undergraduate degrees: Spanish and Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering and her master’s degree is in Biosystems & Agricultural Engineering, all from the University of Kentucky. Her PhD is in Grain Science from Kansas State University. Her research interests are related to food security and reducing postharvest loss. She’s lived in Venezuela, Italy, France, and Brazil and encourages engineering students to study abroad.

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Laura Marie Letellier P.E. University of Kentucky

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Faculty lecturer in the First Year Engineering program at the University of Kentucky.

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David L. Silverstein P.E. University of Kentucky

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David L. Silverstein is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Kentucky. He is also the Director of the College of Engineering's Extended Campus Programs in Paducah, Kentucky, where he has taught for 19 years. His PhD and MS studies in ChE were completed at Vanderbilt University, and his BSChE at the University of Alabama. Silverstein's research interests include conceptual learning tools and training, and he has particular interests in faculty development. He is the recipient of several ASEE awards, including the Fahein award for young faculty teaching and educational scholarship, the Corcoran award for best article in the journal Chemical Engineering Education (twice), and the Martin award for best paper in the ChE Division at the ASEE Annual Meeting.

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Derek Lynn Englert University of Kentucky

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John R. Baker P.E. University of Kentucky

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John R. Baker is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky Extended Campus Program in Paducah, KY. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. After obtaining his B.S., he spent three years working in the Plastics Division of Eastman Chemical Products, Inc. He entered his current position in July 2000.

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Neil Moore University of Kentucky

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Neil Moore is an assistant professor (special title series) in Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches in the First-Year Engineering Program.

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John F. Maddox University of Kentucky

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Dr. John F. Maddox is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky, Paducah Campus. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Auburn University in 2015. His primary research areas are thermal management of high power electronics through jet impingement and thermal characterization of advanced materials used in aerospace and electronics cooling applications.

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Julie Gordon Whitney University of Kentucky

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Julie G. Whitney, Ph.D. received her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN in 1982, her masters in industrial professional technology from Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN in 1986 and her Ph.D in mechanical engineering from the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH in 1992.

From 1979 to 1982 she was a student and then development engineer at General Motors, then interspersed employment, family and degrees between then and 1992 working for TRW, Northern Kentucky University and leading an NSF grant to help young people get started in STEM careers. In 1992 she joined Texas Instruments in gas sensor design and in 1997 she joined Lexmark, Inc. After retiring from Lexmark in 2016 she joined the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY where she is now a lecturer.

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Doug Klein University of Kentucky

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Whitney C. Blackburn-Lynch University of Kentucky

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Abstract

This Work in Progress paper describes the instructional use of computers in first-year engineering courses at the University of Kentucky (UK), a large public land grant institution which is the primary source of engineering graduates in the state. The College of Engineering (COE) at UK has transitioned to a common first-year experience from previously separate departmental introductory courses paired with one of two required computer science courses. The goals for the new curriculum are to increase retention, standardize the number of credits in each degree program and allow students to explore before committing to a specific plan of study. For the new computer programming course, the content pairs the sensors and actuators commonly utilized by a variety of engineers with the programming skills needed to collect and interpret data. These skills carry over to the team design project that involves programming, sensors, actuators, construction and testing of a complete system. The programming skills carried into the sophomore level courses have been well received by some departments and less than satisfactory to other departments which has led to more deliberate independent programming assignments. In this paper, we describe the implementation of in a new course sequence for ~900 students per year and preliminary results from course evaluations across the engineering curricula. While the program has only been in place 3 years, the initial trends show the program is correlated to improving retention, teaching useful programming skills and improving a sense of belonging to engineering which have been shown to correlate to improved graduation rates. Further analysis is needed to compare responses across each engineering and computer science discipline.

Lumpp, J. K., & Lovely, J., & Letellier, L. M., & Silverstein, D. L., & Englert, D. L., & Baker, J. R., & Moore, N., & Maddox, J. F., & Whitney, J. G., & Klein, D., & Blackburn-Lynch, W. C. (2019, June), Instructional Use of Computers in a Hands-on Programming Course for First-Year Engineering Students Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32976

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2019 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015