GE Fund Helps Create Partnership For Engineering Education

2-06-97

University Park, Pa. -- The GE Fund and Penn State's College of Engineering and Eberly College of Science have established a partnership to improve engineering education.

"Pathways to Effective Learning in Engineering," a $431,734 three-year curriculum development grant from the GE Fund,will help integrate engineering problems and applications into two foundation physics courses for engineering students in a new "studio physics" format. It will also help develop a model for converting traditional engineering courses to Web-assisted classes.

Both facets of the grant will involve students in course changes, will integrate industrial partners' projects and mentoring into active-learning classroom problems, and will creatively exploit technology to facilitate cross-disciplinary interaction and learning.

"As engineering educators we wrestle with the challenge of keeping our students motivated during the early phase of their education while they master the scientific foundation they need in mathematics, chemistry, and physics," said David Wormley, dean of engineering. "Support from the GE Fund for this project helps us address this critical challenge immediately, and will lay the groundwork for integrating engineering applications into other base science courses in the future.

"The interdisciplinary nature of the project-in which faculty from our college will work closely with faculty from the Eberly College to develop the new courses-is important to the future of engineering education. We are extremely grateful for the GE Fund's support. It will allow us to expand the improvements in engineering education already established here through ECSEL and the Leonhard Center."

In studio physics, students attend several two-hour class sessions per week, or "studios," instead of standard lectures or recitations. Each session presents students with a new problem or "module," for which student teams must find a solution and submit a written report. The module problems are open-ended and require each team to bring many tools and concepts to bear in determining the solution. Learning is active and emphasizes teamwork, collaborative learning, writing skills and problem solving. Since lecturing on new material is kept to a minimum, students are expected to read assigned material in the textbook. At Penn State, studio physics was implemented for selected first-year physics courses in the fall of 1996.

Engineering and physics faculty will create modules integrating engineering mechanics into one physics course, and electrical engineering and electronics into the second physics course. In the first year of the grant, participants will develop:

-- two pilot studio physics courses

-- techniques or "models" for sharing interdisciplinary course materials on the Internet

-- a student Teaching Intern program for the studio courses

-- faculty development seminars in new teaching methods, such as multimedia presentations or using the Internet.

Subsequent years will see the pilot courses and web techniques expanded to include additional engineering and science courses and faculty; evaluations and refinements will be on going.

Also in the GE Fund grant is an annual contribution of $15,000 for two GE Learning Excellence Awards, to be presented to interdisciplinary faculty teams who promote learning excellence across traditional college boundaries.

Principal Investigators for the project are Dhushy Sathianathan, assistant professor of engineering design and graphics, and Robert Pangborn, professor of engineering mechanics and associate dean for undergraduate studies, in the College of Engineering, and Howard Grotch, head of the Department of Physics in the Eberly College of Science.

Penn State's College of Engineering is a leader in the movement to improve engineering education. Recent accomplishments in this arena include the introduction of team-based projects into engineering design for first-year students; the establishment of the Learning Factory where students build prototypes of design projects; the use of Teaching Interns to enhance active learning projects; and the creation of a $500,000 technology classroom featuring clusters of work stations for advanced computing, communications, and engineering design.

The College of Engineering will also contribute approximately $454,000 to the project over the three-year period.

*lb*

Contacts:
Lani Bloomer College of Engineering: (814) 863-2132
Dr. Sathianathan: (814) 865-2952
Dr. Pangborn: (814) 863-3750
Dr. Grotch: (814) 863-1089