Board 26: Experiment-Centric Pedagogy – Improving the HBCU Engineering Student Learning Experience

Abstract

is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he teaches courses on electromagnetics, electronics and instrumentation, plasma physics, electric power, and general engineering. His research involves plasma physics, electromagnetics, photonics, biomedical sensors, engineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning. He learned problem solving from his father (who ran a gray iron foundry), his mother (a nurse) and grandparents (dairy farmers). He has had the great good fortune to always work with amazing people, most recently professors teaching circuits and electronics from 13 HBCU ECE programs and the faculty, staff and students of the Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) ERC, where he is Education Director. He was RPI ECSE Department Head from 2001 to 2008 and served on the board of the ECE Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) from 2003 to 2008. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE.

Board 65: Work in Progress: Growing and Sustaining a Successful Collaboration of Programs Developing and Implementing Experimental Centric Pedagogy

“…As a step toward growing and sustaining a successful collaboration of programs developing and implementing experimental centric pedagogy, a deeper understanding of the nature of the collaboration between the ECP institutions was studied to address such questions as why it has been successful, how can it be improved, how it can be expanded and adopted by others and how it can be sustained. [6] For example, one key finding from this study was:…”

Additive Manufacturing-Enabled Modular Drone Design Development by Multidisciplinary Engineering Student Team

“…The educational research that underpins the activities of this project is experiential learning and its demonstrated positive in skills and confidence building for underrepresented engineering students. A recent large-scale project (involving 13 HBCU engineering departments) reported very positive outcomes of experiential learning [19]. The activities of our project can be viewed as a case-study to qualitatively evaluate an experiential learning framework whose implementation and adoption can lead to the development of practical student research and engineering design skills and thus supporting our objective of improving the alignment and increasing the diversity of workforce in the aerospace industry.…”

Board 84: The 2TO4 Project - Facilitated Transition from 2-Year to 4-Year Engineering Studies (WIP)

“…IEC grew slowly and purposefully from an original group of 13 HBCUs, starting with a pre-IEC NSF funded project in 2013 that built an effective collaborative network to implement Experiment Centric Pedagogy (ECP) at all partner ECE programs. [3] It was not until after the new IEC non-profit began its life in early 2019 that its MSI membership expanded to its present 21 programs. In addition to these original core members, IEC began to add growing numbers of affiliate members -Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) with strong research enterprisesin late 2020.…”