Creating a bridge to simulate simultaneous engineering experiences for senior undergraduate students

Launching new or improved products to the market typically involves extensive collaboration within and beyond the enterprise. Succeeding in a customer-driven market economy demands the practice of simultaneous engineering. The standard engineering or engineering technology curricula continue to make efforts in providing students with opportunities to engage in real-life projects that simulate simultaneous engineering. However, the educational community as a whole has much to implement in this area. This paper presents an approach used to nurture simultaneous engineering through a unique collaboration between instructors in different disciplines. Student teams, formed from three different classes, conceived problems and worked through a problem-solving model to design and develop solutions. An assessment of these interdisciplinary projects revealed significant learning outcomes and their relationships to the diversity of team members. The experiences of both students and instructors are described and some recommendations made for instructor teams that envisage interdisciplinary student projects.     

Informing about climate change and invasive species: how the presentation of information affects perception of risk,emotions, and learning

Environmental issues such as climate change are becoming ever more important in today’s societies and politics. Information is spread by the media, for example, via the Internet or information brochures, employing different representational styles (e.g. sensational vs. neutral styles, emphasis of human vs. natural causes). We investigated the effects of such differences in presentation when informing about local impacts of climate change – more specifically about invasive species – on perceived risk, emotions, and learning. Seventy-two students at a German university read five brochures about the local effects of climate change and invasive species. They rated their perceived risk and emotions and worked on learning outcome tests. As expected, the sensational style led to higher perceived risk and stronger negative emotions than the neutral style. In addition, our results reveal a potential dilemma for environmental education: while a sensational style enhanced general learning outcomes, it seemed to lead to quite a negative and one-sided view about climate change and invasive species.     

Seeking Diversity in Mathematics Education: Mathematical Modeling in the Practice of Biologists and Mathematicians

Although reform efforts in mathematics education have called for more diverse views of mathematics, there have been few studies of how mathematics is used and takes form in practices outside of mathematics itself. Thus legitimate diverse models have largely been missing in education. This study attempts to broaden our understanding of mathematics by investigating how applied mathematicians and biologists, working together to construct dynamic population models, understand these models within the framework of their perspective practices, that is how these models take on a role as 'boundary objects' between the two practices. By coming to understand how these models function within the practice of biology, the paper suggests that mathematics educators have the opportunity both to reevaluate their own assumptions about modeling and to build an understanding of the dialectic process necessary for these models to develop an epistemological basis that is shared across practices. Investigating this dialectic process is both important and missing in most mathematical classrooms.1     

邻居的番茄--18岁男孩Erick的故事

当我还是个小男孩的时候绝对是很调皮的那种,经常会弄些恶作剧,每次看到别人被我整得气急败坏却又无可奈何时,就觉得特别好玩. 有一年国庆节,爸爸准备举办一个庆祝Party,请周围的亲朋好友都来好好放松一下.我想,这又是一个很好的耍人的机会啦!于是,我在下午就偷偷地藏好了几个大番茄,准备等晚上看到有车子开过来就拿它们扔这些车的窗子.