A Pipeline of High Achievers to STEM Program

Abstract

He is currently a senior professor with the Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at Florida Atlantic University. His current research interests are on K-12 education, engineering learning theories, and education data mining. He has been well funded by the high tech industry over the years. He has 7 US patents, of which 3 have been commercialized by the university. This research work is a collaboration with the Children's Services Council of Broward county in FL.

Smart and Connected Health Apps: A Cross-Disciplinary Effort

“…Prior Research -Multidisciplinary App Development: Over the past six years, approximately 210 of our engineering undergraduate students have worked with 140 students from other disciplines (arts, anthropology, urban planning, K-12, nursing, and business) in developing about 55 good smart phone apps, most of them relevant to the community, citizen science, empowerment, and health care (Donate et al 2015, andShankar et al 2017a). Students have worked in interdisciplinary teams of 3 to 8.…”

“…This is one of a few papers submitted to the ASEE conference by our group. Each paper addresses a different aspect and a different type of student group, but there is some commonality in the methods, theories, and assessments used (See Donate et al, 2015, and Shankar et al, 2017aand 2017b.…”

“…As part of the curriculum, we scheduled four Face-to-Face (F2F) evening (nonclass room) sessions where students from all the disciplines came together to discuss and present their app development progress. More details may be found in other papers from our group (Donate et al 2015& Shankar et al 2017aand 2017b.…”

“…We now feel comfortable in offering full-fledged transdisciplinary courses in spring 2018, at which time formative evaluation will be undertaken (see the discussion section). We document our efforts at formative evaluation in another paper submitted to this conference (Shankar, et al, 2017a). The third part, summative assessment, was used to ensure students are making adequate progress in their skill acquisition (by assigning target specific assignments) so their team will be successful in their effort to build an app.…”

“…The teaching and mentoring involved 3 faculty members (co-authors of this paper), one each from engineering, nursing, and digital multimedia. We could undertake such an ambitious project since we have addressed the various sub-aspects of transdisciplinary collaboration in our previous course offerings (Donate et al, 2015, Shankar, et al, 2017a. All the Apps are published as public repositories at a Github site (GitHub 2016).…”