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In January 2016, Georgia Tech launched a campus-wide academic initiative (“Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain”) aimed at preparing undergraduate students in all majors to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to contribute to the major societal challenge of creating sustainable communities. The initiative calls for faculty members from all six Georgia Tech colleges to develop courses and co-curricular opportunities that will help students learn about sustainability and community engagement and hone their skills by engaging in real-world projects with nonprofit, community, government, and business partners. Affiliated courses address various aspects of the Center’s sustainable communities framework, which presents sustainability as an integrated system connecting environment, economy, and society. This chapter reports on one engineering instructor’s ongoing efforts that bring sustainability into the engineering classroom through sociotechnical project-based learning. This cornerstone design course is one of more than 100 Center-affiliated courses currently offered; the full set of Center-affiliated courses enrolls over 5,000 students per year across all six colleges. The sustainability activities introduced in the freshman design course pertain particularly to the Center’s vision that all graduates of the institute, a majority of whom will graduate with engineering degrees, are able to contribute to the creation of sustainable communities and to understand the impact of their professional practice on the communities in which they work. A situated knowledge and learning pedagogical theory is used in the Center-affiliated course, where concept, activity, and context are involved in student learning to produce useable robust knowledge. The sociotechnical project-based teaching model with contextualized design problems is used to engage students throughout the course by utilizing computer-aided-design problems that incorporate sustainability within both individual and team projects. In this chapter, the authors present the pedagogical approaches to learning, strategies, and challenges for implementation and assessment of intervention activities, and data analyses of both student reflection data and pre- and post-survey data.

Present-day engineering education is in dire need to expose would-be engineers to a systemic view of the world. Society’s problems are getting increasingly complex “wicked” problems, and they require inter and transdisciplinary approaches to understand and “dissolve” them (that is to solve them systemically). In this context, the purpose of this paper is to invite engineering educators to reflect on the need to teach systems thinking and spark their interest on finding appropriate methods to do so. This paper aims to describe an actual intervention at Universidad de Ibagué (UNIBAGUE), Colombia, where the methodology of teaching systems thinking as a foreign language has been on trial for one year.

Starting with a simple model of teaching systems thinking, and using an action-research methodology, the teaching model is gradually evolved to a model for teaching systems thinking as a foreign language.

The authors only have preliminary qualitative results with this systems-thinking teaching model. Although these results are encouraging (the authors think basic systems concepts are better apprehended by the students), further research is needed. One objective of the present paper is precisely to invite engineering educators to experiment with this teaching model.

The authors think it is necessary to exploit further the teaching-a-foreign-language analogy. There is a vast experience on methods for teaching second and foreign languages. They could enrich the method and hint at possible directions for further research.

Teaching systems thinking is a field still open for wide research. The pedagogical model developed in this research to teach systems thinking could benefit other teachers of systems thinking to build upon.

As one of the referees pointed out: “The implications of the insides obtained in this research are very significant to society. The problem observed in the systems thinking researchers and practitioner's community about how to disseminate systems thinking knowledge and how to embed this way of thinking into the minds of young people (K-12, university, etc.) is addressed in this research. In it is shown an experience that provides very valuable insides about how this can be done.

The idea of teaching systems thinking as a foreign language has not been widely explored. Furthermore, we feel that inasmuch as systems thinking is more of a skill or competency, than a technique or theory, then the model of teaching which emerges from this case study might be more appropriate than models of teaching based in the old educational paradigm.

The twenty-first century will be dominated by technological change as the United States competes in an increasingly interdependent world. If the United States is to maintain its technological leadership, an inclusive engineering education is required. Engineering impacts many important aspects of day-to-day life from the environment to national security and half of our graduate degrees in engineering are granted to foreign nationals. While this influx of creative talent enriches the academic community, the underutilization of domestic talent threatens the engineering enterprise with professional shortages in university classrooms, research facilities, and corporate boardrooms. We are simultaneously challenged with addressing the shrinking pool of African-American males in higher education. The challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. Many African-American students have aspirations for engineering without the preparation and the community college is well suited to provide the bridge between aspiration and accomplishment. Community colleges serve 46% of all African-American students in higher education and there are exemplary programs that have tapped the underdeveloped resources in the African-American community. One example is the Emerson Minority Engineering Scholarship Program. By utilizing best practices, this program has helped to increase the pool of African-American engineers by providing opportunities to students who may have made other academic choices. This paper reviews persistence literature and discusses the challenges and strategies in developing a community college-based minority engineering program.

The paper's purpose is to promote the use of modern technologies such as multimedia packages to engineering students. The aim is to help them to learning in their learning, visualization, problem solving and understanding engineering concepts such as in mechanics dynamics.

TAPS packages are developed to help students solve selected engineering problems in a step‐by‐step approach. A comparison is made with existing commercial engineering packages to see if TAPS packages could further enhance the learning process.

The differences found were indicative of better presentation and clarity, step‐by‐step approach to solve engineering problems, user‐friendly environment, unbiased assessment of performance and flexibility to incorporate 3‐D geometric models in the TAPS packages.

The TAPS packages were compared with two commercial engineering packages and were based on a small number of users. A larger sample size of students would be required to see if TAPS packages are productive enough to be used locally in Malaysian universities and higher learning institutions.

The main originality of the paper can be seen from the development of the TAPS packages and the comparative study with existing commercial engineering packages. The differences found are explained in details in this paper.

This paper aims to present the development of technology‐assisted problem solving (TAPS) packages at University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN). The project is the further work of the development of interactive multimedia based packages targeted for students having problems in understanding the subject of engineering mechanics dynamics.

In this study TAPS packages are compared with other selected engineering computer packages.

The differences found were indicative of better presentation and clarity, step‐by‐step approach to solve engineering problems, user‐friendly environment, unbiased assessment of performance and flexibility to incorporate 3‐D geometric models in the TAPS packages.

This paper provides a brief account of the differences between the TAPS packages approach used in this research with that of commercial simulation packages accompanying the engineering mechanics dynamics textbook and will be of interest to those in the field of engineering.

The public image of the engineer is highly favourable. He is regarded as a member of a professional class. He is admired for his skills in mathematics and science, two ‘glamour’ studies. He is respected in the community, considered to be mechanically oriented and admired both for his skills and successes.

The purpose of this article is to discuss a project to enhance Texas A&M University at Qatar Library's (TAMUQL's) engineering curriculum, graduate, and research programs with newly acquired monographs and maps.

The project was carried out with the partnership and cooperation of TAMUQL, YBP Library Services and TAMUL.

The project succeeded in meeting the objectives of the project, which included supporting the needs of freshmen to senior levels of the liberal arts curriculum as well as those of the faculty.

This paper adds to the growing documentation of the value of working partnerships between libraries and vendors.

Part one of Joan Ilivicky's article appeared in the January issue

Advancements in technology require that everyone is skilled with computational thinking (CT), problem-solving and computer programming skills. This study aims to examine the development of CT in problem-solving skills (PSS) and programming learning attitude by integrating LEGO robotics kits in a project-based learning course.

This study examines the development of CT in PSS and programming learning attitude by integrating LEGO robotics kits in a project-based learning course. This study consists of a single group pre-post-test research design with 32 freshmen university students. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by pre-post-tests and recording of classroom discussions, respectively.

Therefore, this finding implies that robotics can be used to develop CT in university students; however, there is a need for designing curricula with advanced robotic kits as artificial intelligence (AI) has become more prevalent. Hence, programming knowledge learned will help students to understand the application of robots in AI.

The study creates educators' awareness that CT skills might be developed in freshmen university students through robotics. However, many still consider them toys rather than learning aids.

This paper examines the educational environment of indigenous Gulf Arab students at a UAE institution, many from rural families and with English skills that need further development. The influences on a group of freshman Engineering students, their developing learning skills and the coaching they are given is explored. Practical methods for motivating such students to cross boundaries of world-view and sentiment are discussed, whereby a focus is maintained on their personal context and objectives whilst aiming to achieve excellence in academic accomplishment. A pre-freshman stage is introduced to fill the language void, easing the transition between High School, College and University. A personal view is presented from an educator who himself is crossing many boundaries.