He has previously served as Proposal Engineer and Proposal Engineering Supervisor at Grob System, Inc. and Software Engineer at Shaum Manufacturing, Inc. He has held a number of leadership and advisory positions in various entrepreneurial ventures. He is currently a KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Education Network) Fellow, and has served as a Faculty Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA and an Invited Professor at INRIA Rhone-Alpes, Monbonnot, France. Research interests include computer vision, mobile robotics, intelligent vehicles, entrepreneurship, and education.
The benefits and challenges of flipping classrooms have been demonstrated in many recent papers, including several presented in the Mechanical Engineering Division at American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition. This, combined with very negative student reviews of the current textbook, convinced the author at Ohio Northern University (ONU) to experiment with a partially-flipped classroom in the fall semester of 2013. In preparation for this, the author found a tremendous amount of already-developed video and text resources available online for no cost, and often very high quality. This led to the idea for this paper -can a flipped classroom be taught using only these types of resources?This has been done twice now at ONU in a senior-level design course. The online content includes popular videos (such as TED talks), how-to guides (either video or text), and reference materials or case studies.Initial student responses have been very positive, with some students noting they are actually enjoying an engineering class for the first time. Surveys regarding this approach, as well as student performance on common final exam questions, are included. Preliminary findings indicate that in general this approach can work, but that there are certain content areas in which the available resources are very weak. A summary of resources used and student ratings of each will also be provided. BACKGROUND
Though microcontroller programming has traditionally been the dominion of electrical and computer engineers, other engineers must be familiar with the capability and integration of microcontrollers for interdisciplinary tasks. Ohio Northern University has started a two-week module on microcontroller programming in the Computer Applications course required for all mechanical engineers. The course begins with programming instruction in Matlab®, which is then applied in the microcontroller module. Each student had the in-class use of his or her own Arduino® Uno-based track-driven robot.A number of lessons were learned that would help others to successfully implement this type of module. For instance, hobby-grade robots did not prove sufficiently robust for classroom use, and recently-standard MATLAB/Simulink® native support for Arduino processors is not yet a smooth integration.Despite these and other difficulties, many students were engaged by the activity. Though less than 8% of the ME students had programmed Arduino or other microcontrollers before this class, 61% indicated that they "would like to play more with microcontrollers in the future." Other survey results support the success of the trial and guided its revision for the next course offering.
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