Chad Davis

Reversing the Trend of Engineering Enrollment Declines With Innovative Outreach, Recruiting, and Retention Programs

This paper discusses an all-encompassing approach to increase the number of students in engineering through innovative outreach, recruiting, and retention programs. Prior to adopting these programs, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Oklahoma (OU), Norman, experienced a reduction in engineering enrollment similar to the trend that has occurred across the U.S. over the last few years. As a result, the school investigated the key factors that influence selection of engineering as a career path and initiated a corrective program to reverse this trend. The program involves focusing on the present through retention, on the immediate future through recruiting, and on the distant future through outreach. The focus of all of these programs is to mobilize the OU-ECE faculty and student body to present advanced engineering technologies, innovative demonstrations, and hands-on activities at a level that the individual student can understand and appreciate. Student surveys and interviews are used to assess the program qualitatively, and OU-ECE enrollment numbers are used as a quantitative assessment.

Innovate engineering outreach: A special application of the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor

In November of 2010, Microsoft released the Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 video game console. This device-similar to a webcam-allows an individual to interact with an Xbox 360 or a computer in three-dimensional space using an infrared depth-finding camera and a standard RGB camera. As of January of 2012, over 24 million units have been sold. Using a combination of custom and open-source software, we were able to develop a means for students to visualize and interact with the data allowing us to introduce the concepts and skills used in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The unique technological application, visual appeal of the output, and the widespread ubiquity of the device make this an ideal platform for raising interest in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering among high school students.In order to understand the appeal of the Kinect, a working knowledge of the technical details of the device is useful. The novelty and appeal of the Kinect sensor lies in its infrared camera, which is comprised of two distinct devices. An infrared projector sends out a 640x480 grid of infrared beams, and an infrared detector is used to measure how long the reflection of each beam takes to return to the sensor. This data set is known as a “point cloud”. This point cloud is a three-dimensional vector comprised of data points between 40 and 2000, which correspond to distance from the device of each beam. The data in this array can then be parsed to construct a 3d image. The Kinects infrared camera operates at 30Hz, or 30 samples per second, so the device is able to deliver a frame rate that is sufficient to create the illusion of motion. This allows for the development of applications that give the user a sense of interacting in real time with the image on the screen. The unique visual appeal, novelty of interaction, and relatively easy-to-understand theory of operation make the Kinect an attractive platform for recruitment and outreach. Using the Kinect, a recruiter is able to quickly and effectively demonstrate a range of concepts involving hardware, software, and the design process on a platform that students are familiar with and find appealing. In a short window of time they are able to show examples and explain the fundamental principles of the system while providing tangible, meaningful, and enjoyable interactivity with the device itself. This level of approachability and familiarity is rare among highly-technical fields, and provides an excellent catalyst to develop interest in Electrical and Computer Engineering education.

Innovative practices for engineering professional development courses

Many universities require engineering majors to take some form of a professional development course. Generally, the goal of these courses is to prepare students for the engineering profession. Another important aspect of these courses is to provide a mechanism to satisfy accreditation criteria on student outcomes that are difficult to implement in other technical courses. At the University of Oklahoma, most engineering disciplines take the course titled: ENGR 2002 - Professional Development. Historically, this course was effective in satisfying accreditation requirements on student outcomes, but was not well received by the students. Details of the reasons for this dissatisfaction and changes made in the re-design of this course are discussed in this paper. The new version of ENGR 2002 includes many innovative practices in team-based learning and peer learning that are shared in this paper. All of the vital elements of the four projects included in the course are provided to support others who would like to implement similar projects. Course surveys, completed by 148 students, were used as the primary assessment method. Additionally, standard course evaluations were used to compare this course to other engineering courses and show improvement from the previous version of ENGR 2002. Many student comments are included in the paper to show their reaction to different aspects of the course. One student made a comment that echoed our sentiments regarding the teaching of this course for the first time in the fall 2012 semester: “from being in this class it is noticeable that people need to take it to work on public speaking skills or working with groups.” From our experience, many students grow a great deal in terms of communication effectiveness and ability to function on a multi-disciplinary team as a result of this course, and we believe these skills are essential to become a great engineer.

Work in progress - FIRST robotics competition from the perspective of a first time mentor

This paper documents the experience of a first time mentor in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). FIRST is an organization whose goal is to inspire the next generation of students to pursue careers in Computer Science, Engineering, and Technology (CSET). FRC is an annual competition where high school students all over the nation compete in a fun learning experience and are assisted by mentors in the local community. The details of the Oklahoma City (OKC) regional competition are provided and the impact of FRC is assessed through student surveys. The long-term goal of this ongoing work is to quantitatively assess the impact of the FRC program at Capitol Hill High School through statistics of survey results, graduation rates, college enrollment, and CSET majors.

Work in progress - utilizing projects and innovative demonstrations in student recruitment

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Oklahoma (OU) is currently experiencing a decline in new enrollments that is similar to the national trends for engineering disciplines. In an effort to increase the interest in ECE and engineering in general, outreach activities focused on advanced technologies and innovative demonstrations are being deployed. These recruiting techniques are modeled from successful programs such as Botball and FIRST Robotics that have approximately 200,000 combined student participants. Demonstrations that showcase advanced technologies have been performed at over twenty k-12 outreach events over the last year. This paper discusses this recruiting technique and the expected impact on future engineering enrollment.

Architecture and performance of an instrumented RF system that utilizes the GNSS satellite network

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is the space segment of the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the GNSS signals may be measured via instrumented ground stations to provide improved positional information for aircraft landing. This paper presents an instrumented RF system to demonstrate these properties. In particular, a landing system will be studied in this paper. By definition, the Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) provides local GPS error corrections to aircraft from a ground-based station. The Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) is one implementation of GBAS that is being developed to meet the needs of very low-visibility instrument approaches. There are concerns of the possibility that a LAAS ground station might inadvertently transmit a signal in space (SIS) that includes Hazardous Misleading Information (HMI). The current method of detecting HMI relies heavily on statistical inference to determine the integrity of the transmitted error corrections. This paper presents a method of closing the loop of the LAAS transmission to deterministically reduce the probability of transmitting HMI.