Tom Martin is a Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and the School of Architecture + Design. He is the co-director of the Virginia Tech E-textiles Lab and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from C...

In many pedagogical situations, it is advantageous to give students some autonomy: for example, instead of assigning the same homework problem to all the students, to give students a choice between several similar problems, so that each student can choose a problem whose context best fits his or her experiences. A recent experimental study shows that there is a 45% correlation between degree of...

Studies have shown that it is difficult for people to deal with multicriteria decisionmaking situations. Information technology tools such as decision-support systems and expert systems have been developed in order to help them in such situations. Another tool that has been identified as helping managers understand complex engineering decisionmaking situations is multimedia instructional materi...

1 Ifiok Otung, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd CF37 1DL, UK [email protected] Abstract  Evidence is presented of the mathematics problem facing engineering departments and a possible solution is discussed based on a new teaching approach that puts engineering first and mathematics second without impacting negatively on standards. Described as minimalmathematics, this approach requires a f...

Many software engineering courses (and methods) begin with an assumption that software requirements are presented to software engineers in a complete, consistent, feasible, testable, and traceable form, and that the software engineer’s main job is to correctly transform the requirements into code. This is generally an unhealthy approach, as the requirements for virtually all significant softwar...

Some new ideas in teaching mathematics to engineering students and the implementation of these ideas into the teaching of mechanical engineering students at Brighton University are discussed. The importance of explaining to the students why knowledge of mathematics is essential for their future practical work is emphasized. Mathematics is a language for expressing physical, chemical and enginee...

This position paper describes our work with a new course at Sussex University, designed to bridge the gap between computer science and software engineering. We argue that the way in which software engineering is introduced in most computer science degrees makes it hard for students to internalise the lessons of good engineering practice. In particular, programming is seen to be divorced from so...

During the past 15 years NASA has taken the lead role in exploiting the benefits of textile reinforced composite materials for application to aircraft structures. The NASA Advanced Composites Technology (ACT) program was started in 1989 to develop composite primary structures for commercial transport airplanes with costs that are competitive with metal structures. As part of this program, sever...