Graduate Competencies#
Teach Engineering#
As an individual that is pursuing a PhD in how we as a society can better teach and develop engineers, it makes sense that I should be a leader in this space. While it is a solemn responsibility to help teach and train other leaders to develop new and cutting-edge curriculum that will help form our future engineers and scientists, I should also be comfortable teaching and interacting with the students directly, whether they are just learning what engineering is in elementary school, to those pursuing advanced degrees.
Indirectly, I have been developing myself in this competency my entire professional life. Even when I was in high school, I was learning how to effectively teach science and engineering principles to youth in the Boy Scouts of America. After high school, I would argue my undergraduate experience at Michigan Technological University a success much in part to my teaching roles in the physics department, where I was a teaching assistant and lab manager for our undergraduate instructional labs.
As an educator in the engineering space, my ability to teach a variety of engineering concepts in a variety of different contexts is arguably the most impactful competency for my career. My work, research, and general livelihood all revolve around bettering myself as an educator, and as I improve my other competencies, they will likely be from an educator’s perspective.
Past and Current Work
K12 Education
In my Master’s program, I worked to develop curriculum for environmental science, biology, and mechatronics. After graduation, I taught mechatronics and engineering fundamentals in Winder, Georgia, both at the secondary, and technical college level. I developed a detailed pathway curriculum for our mechatronics program at Sims Academy, which led to a dual-enrollment course at Lanier Technical College, which set the students up to finish a mechatronics certificate program is just one more semester.
As of writing this (October 18, 2023) I just got a phone call from a past student the previous night who completed my pathway wanted to excitedly tell me that they finished their mechatronics degree at Lanier Tech, and is now pursuing industrial engineering. This student faced a lot of personal struggles in their time with me at Sims Academy, and it was a great time reflecting with this student on this call about their past work, and their future aspirations.
University Education
I am now a Senior Instructional Lab Coordinator in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, where I run our fundamental electronics instructional lab. In this lab, I interact with over 700 students each semester, helping them learn the fundamentals of electrical engineering. I also manage nearly 50 teaching assistants that help me run this lab effectively, which makes me focus not just on teaching electrical engineering, but teaching how to teach electrical engineering. This is a mutually beneficial experience for our developing leaders and educators in engineering, along with myself. During this time, I have also been redeveloping the structure of our fundamentals lab, focusing on practicality and personal projects, so students will find use in the topics covered in the lab regardless of their discipline. This new lab setup, along with tutorial videos for the labs, can be found on the Lessons and Assessments page.
Future Work
Learning how to better teach students in STEM, and teaching how to teach in STEM fields has been a life long passion for me, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. In my role as a Lab Coordinator at Purdue, by position is evolving to manage and support curriculum across our instructional labs, not just our fundamentals course. By the end of the Spring 2024 semester, I will have a plan to fully map our current curriculum from when students first enter our ECE program, all the way to senior design. By the end of Spring 2024, I will also be developing a plan to maintain curriculum consistency between our West Lafayette and Indianapolis campus, which will be opening in Fall 2024.
Along with my work in ECE, I hope to contribute to research in the K-16 space, primarily looking at how we prepare high-school students for STEM college programs and careers. I would also like to better understand and improve how we improve our connection to new college students at a college and university level, helping bridge the gap between high-school, college, or career.
Explain and Critique Education Policy#
As a developing scholar in Engineering Education, it is a responsibility to be able to discuss the policies that exist in the education space to whoever wants or needs to hear that information. It is also important to be critical of these policies, and ensure that the policies in place are effective, fair, and beneficial for the students and educators that are expected to maintain and uphold these policies.
With my former employment as a high-school teacher, I have been exposed to many different policies in the education space, and have first-hand experience about how the effectiveness of policies can benefit or harm those that are active in the space. In that time, I have helped develop policies, and have been outspoken to administrators about how some policies should be improved. I am now an instructional staff member at the university level, and have been exposed to yet another set of policies and shape how our instructional processes are implemented. I am at a level in my employment where I am able to effectively express my opinions on such policies, and my education in Engineering Education will help me as a leader in instructional labs make educated and impactful decisions for our students and fellow staff members.
Past and Current Work
Technology in the K12 Classroom
While I was teaching mechatronics and engineering at the high-school level, I was also the technology coach for the school, and was on the leadership team. In these roles, I was delegated to assist teachers in using technology more effectively in their classroom, and collecting and analyzing instructional and assessment data for the school. I worked with school-level and district administration to ensure that I was providing accurate and meaningful information and instructions to my fellow teachers.
Technology in the classroom is an interesting topic of conversation, there is little debate on the fact that students need exposure to the current technology being used in society, but large debate on how to effectively do this task. An issue that I came across as the technology coach and teacher is that the district’s push for “new and innovative” technology, but did not fully know how the the technology should be implemented in the classroom. The main example of this would be the large, tough-screen, smart televisions that the district purchased for every classroom, replacing the standard projector/interactive board display that was previously in the classroom. The argument for the television purchase was that teachers were simply using the interactive boards as second monitors at the front of the classroom to present information, which could be solved by using the interactive television that could move around the room instead. Multiple collogues along with myself discussed with administration that instead of spending millions of dollars on these televisions, we could implement better training on the current boards, along with dedicating those funds to improving the student computers in the district, or other initiatives that would likely be of greater benefit to the students.
Ultimately, my colleagues and I were brought into the conversation too late, and the purchase of the televisions was already being processed. District policies were put in place that enforced and rewarded the “innovative” use of the televisions to the point where teachers were getting evaluations stating they were not using new technology in innovative ways in their classroom. Technology coaches were expected to provide trainings to teachers on different tools and methods that were “unique” to the televisions over other forms of media presentations. Since most of the applications for the televisions were still in development or oriented to younger students, the training on the televisions were often considered ineffective for teachers beyond middle school. Over the next academic year, we saw the televisions being used in a virtually the same fashion as the projector/interactive display board across the entire district. This led to similar, if not identical conversations about how technology should be integrated in the classroom, with administration requesting more funding to get different technologies. This cyclical cycle has numerous different causes and effects that ultimately restricts progress for teachers and students in the classroom. Fortunately, administration did call for feedback earlier in the follow-up conversations compared to when the televisions were purchased in the first place, but the decisions of what technology is in the classroom and how it is to be used is still being ineffectively controlled by those not teaching in the classroom, a continuous issue that K-12 teachers and educators face on a regular basis.
K12 Computer Science Initiative
As a technology coach and one of the few educators in the district that had a background in computer science, I was tasked with helping promote the initiative in the state of Georgia to graduate more high school students with experience in computer science, and prepare teachers to teach computer science courses. This initiative came with the concern that Georgia colleges were only graduating about 10% of the state’s need for computer scientists. With the assumption that most of those graduates would stay in Georgia for employment and homes, Georgia would still need over 15,000 computer scientists to fill the current market.
A proposed progression to fill this demand was to get more computer science courses in the K-12 classrooms, increasing the interest in computer science, and thus encouraging more students to pursue computer science as a degree. I enthusiastically support this thought process, but it needs to be implemented properly. One of the largest hurdles that is currently facing K-12 schools across the country is that teachers need to be accredited in computer science through a degree or certificate program in order to be able to teach it, meaning that there are very few teachers proportionally in the country that are able to teach computer science. Add on the perpetual teacher shortage in the United States, and it led to the district I was teaching in having three teachers with computer science backgrounds including myself. Part of the selling point teachers were supposed to use to promote computer science to students was the very high average salary of a computer scientist, nearly double the state average salary, and about 2.5 times the average teacher salary in the district at the time. The notion was brought up that those that get a computer science degree would not want to enter the education space due to the salary difference, and it was argued that a teacher’s passion will outweigh the salary disparity. The question of who is expected to pay for the teacher training to be able to get more backgrounds in computer science, either the district or the teacher. The district was able to offer a stipend that would cover about two thirds of the costs and would come with a time-commitment contract to the district. I strongly disagreed with the process the district was planning on going with, and argued for better financial and mentoring support during and after the training of teachers. While I have not been involved with the initiative in the district since I took a position at Purdue University, current polling (2022) shows that the district has four teachers that are teaching computer science, a net change of one teacher over the span of three years.
One of the trickiest parts about K-12 education is that the regulations and policies are so tightly interwoven, preventing significant change without having to address numerous, if not countless, other policies when a single policy is trying to be changed. This leads to districts, states, and countries trying to fix surface-level issues, and then reaching a bottleneck when further issues unravel due to them not being prepared to tackle further issues. This is not to say that these policies are not needed, but instead to argue for more transparency of the policies, and that anywhere the policies are unclear, the final call should be given to the teacher in the best interest of their students.
University Teaching Assistant Training
In my current role as a lab coordinator in ECE, there are similar and different policies in place that I have to follow when working with students and instructors in our instructional labs. One of my largest obligations right now is developing effective training for our teaching assistants in our instructional labs. Our instructional labs in ECE rely heavily on the work of undergraduate and graduate students in order for the labs to run smoothly. A graduate student will run a lab section with the undergraduate students assisting with questions and grading throughout the semester. These training programs have received push-back from senior faculty due to a requested time commitment, and from returning teaching assistants as the training is often repetitive from semester from semester. It can be argued that the repetition and reflection is necessary for being a productive educator, just as the there is a lot of overlap between the competencies discussed here, but there is room for improvement in how the trainings are presented. This has led to involving experienced teaching assistants in the training process and running some trial training sessions where the teaching assistants themselves present the content as a table discussion and expertise panel. This came with a lot of great feedback that we will be implementing in the future, along with hopefully developing a student organization that will focus on creating a collective voice for teaching assistants and training.
As if the Fall 2023 semester, I am now part of the ECE ABET committee and the ECE curriculum committee to provide additional feedback on how the instructional policies being implemented in the school will or are impacting our instructional labs. I hope that my work on these committees will allow for different perspectives for the other staff and faculty on the boards and allow for a more meaningful experience for our students in ECE. Future Work
In my role in ECE, along with my work in Engineering Education, I like to think that I am in an ideal location to be able to advocate for the teaching assistants that I work with on a daily basis, along with my professional colleagues in the instructional labs. As I become more familiar with the different policies and regulations that impact how we run our instructional labs, I can continue to push for productive and meaningful change to allow for the greatest practical education we can provide to our students, along with ensuring that our teaching assistants are properly trained and compensated for their work.
As I work on research in the K-16 space, I hope that I am also able to provide a reasonable voice as to why some policies were put in place, and help further develop the foundation for teachers and teacher leaders to share their voice on how the current policies in place impact them and their students. I hope that my experience as a k-12 educator will help teachers collaborate and provide effective feedback on studies and curriculum discussion, and allow us to develop effective content for our future scientists and engineers.
Demonstrate Engineering Skills#
Being a scholar in Engineering education, it only makes sense that one should be proficient, if not an expert in core engineering practices, and be able to demonstrate those proficiencies. It could be argued that this should be the easiest competency for an engineer to demonstrate in this program, the only problem being that I am not an engineer.
Since I do not have a formal or professional engineering background, I hold the burden to show that I have the ability to demonstrate engineering principles, and apply these principles in a variety of formats. The primary way that I display my abilities in engineering is in the form of teaching these principles, specifically in the engineering branches of mechatronics and electronics. I have been developing my proficiency in engineering in non-traditional ways, primarily with personal projects in numerous fields on electronics which started as a hobby during my physics degree, and now has become a career. Developing my proficiency in engineering concepts will be an ever-developing task for me as I continue to work on my own personal skills, and finding better ways to teach and discuss the concepts with colleagues and students.
Past and Current Work.
Hobby into a Career
My interest in engineering, primarily electrical engineering, started when I took my only formal electronics course at Michigan Tech during my physics degree. This course was designed in a way to provide a practical approach to electronics for those entering a physics research lab. From this course, I taught myself how to make audio equipment, program microcontrollers, and design and use CNC machines. My electronics hobby gave me a stark contrast from my primarily theoretical degree by allowing me to focus almost exclusively on practical applications in electronics. Ironically, I did not focus on the physics in the electronics too much, only as an occasional indulgence when exploring semiconductors, but instead having the mindset of needing to find a solution to a problem, and then finding a specific circuit or component which would provide that solution. Through this mindset, I explored numerous electronics concepts through countless personal projects, learning more every time.
K12 Education
This practical mindset provided a strong foundation to teach electronics to high school and technical college students in my first chapter of my education career. I focused on developing a mechatronics curriculum that would allow students learn electronics and manufacturing concepts on a small, personal scale, and then apply that to a larger manufacturing process. Industrial heaters started as home ovens with a thermostat and heating element. Industrial farming started with garden automation. Robotic control started with Halloween animatronics. Not only did these smaller approaches bring the concepts closer to the student’s own personal experiences, it opened the door to different personal projects that interested the students in a variety of contexts. I still get letters and emails from students talking about the projects that they are working on, a personal favorite part of any day when that occurs. A former student recently (as of November 2023) just contacted me stating that they made a nearly autonomous hydroponics system that is able to detect with certain nutrients are out of sync for the desired crop, and alert them to make adjustments. I also hear from students that are excited to tell me they have continued education in manufacturing or engineering, and pursuing even more education to further improve themselves and the companies that are paying for the vast majority of their education.
University Education
As a lab coordinator for ECE at Purdue University, I run a electronics fundamentals course where the lab is also a service course for non-ECE students. This puts pressure on me as an instructor to ensure that I meet the needs of multiple disciplines. Maintaining a practical mindset for electronics allows me to introduce the necessary theory for students to understand the material, continue it in further classes, and start exploring the concepts in either a scheduled lab course, or in personal projects. One of the main changes I made to the lab when I took over was promoting personal projects in the lab by making one of the projects on the 555 timer very open-ended, allowing students to explore any of the countless applications of the chip in any way they chose. This has led to fantastic conversations about how the timer operates, how to ensure the trigger and control pins work together properly, and how to use it in different settings. The great thing is that these conversations have been occurring regardless of the students’ discipline. Regardless of the students’ area of study, they are exploring and experimenting with the electronic components and seeing the practical benefits to tinkering and developing small projects to learn the material.
One of my favorite things to do in the lab is walk around with some of the personal projects that I am currently working on. With Halloween recently passing, I made an animatronic skull from the discounted plastic Halloween parts from the local home-improvement stores. I attached a servo to the jaw, put LEDs in the eyes, and attached a hobby remote controller to actuate the parts from a distance. In total, the project costed less than $10USD (minus the RC controller which I pulled from an old RC car). Students were stunned to learn that personal projects can be entertaining and inexpensive if approached properly, and eager to learn more about how they can get started with projects like the skull. I hope that this leads to more projects being done by students before they reach their capstone projects, and I think we are on the right track with promoting the practicality of the concepts at an early level.
Personal Projects:
3-D Printing and CNC Machining: My most continuous hobby. Has now included maintaining and improving a variety of I3 style printers, a 40W CO2 CNC laser engraver, desktop and full bench CNC lathes, and PCB spindle engravers.
COVID-19 PPE development and distribution: During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I ran 14 3d printers and CNC machines in my garage making PPE (Face coverings and shields) to be distributed to local civil service workers and first responders. COVID-19
Stepper Motor MIDI player: Using the varying stepper-motor frequencies to play music from a MIDI Input.
Animatronics:
“Purdon’t Pete:” An animatronic replica of the university mascot. Eyes light up with addressable LEDs, and servo motors control the motion of the head with 3 degrees of motion.
Next steps: Adding vision processing to detect motion and eye contact. Speaker to implement voice and other sound effects.
Chompy the shoulder Skull: A skull made from discount Halloween props to promote cost-effective and fun personal projects to students. Eyes light up, and jaw actuates with control from RC receiver.
Mad-Eye’s eye: An anamatronic wearable eye that twitches and sits comfortably on the face.
BattleBots: Helped form Purdue’s Railside Robotics- a student organization committed to teaching the engineering design process through combat robotics
LawnMower: BeetleWeight (3lb) horizontal spinner bot
DustMop: Antweight (1lb) flipper control bot
Technical Skills:
Software:
MATLAB - Programmed many complex physics and mathematical simulations and various data analysis programs
SPICE: Proficient in and have taught SPICE simulation methods in a variety of SPICE platforms
LaTeX - Written over 100 professional documents, including research reports, letters of recommendation, and assessments
Arduino and Raspberry Pi application development
Fluent in: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, HTML, Visual Basic, Mathematica
Hardware:
CNC: Constructed and maintained over 20 different multi-axis CNC machines, including printers, plotters, mills, and arms
Resourceful: Have made a variety of scientific instruments out of scrap materials.
Troubleshooting and Repair: Experienced in fabricating, fixing and rebuilding experimental equipment and setups
Microscopes: Trained in the operation of Atomic Force, Electron, and Scanning Tunneling Microscopes
Material Analysis: Trained in the methods and operation of X-Ray Diffraction, Heat Processing, and Pulse Laser Deposition
Future Work
Using a practical engineering mindset to make different electronic projects is genuinely one of my favorite hobbies, I plan to continue this in a variety of fashions for the remainder of my career and life. I hope to continue to promote this mindset through research on how we can better incorporate personal projects at every level of education, from as early as kindergarten to students pursuing advanced degrees. With the large emphasis on semiconductor education in the United States right now, getting students involved with circuit design and projects using diodes and MOSFETs will allow us to not only promote practical and effective use and design of the components, but also seed that engineering mindset to develop, improve, and create.
Communicate Knowledge#
It is my responsibility as a leader in Engineering Education to be able to present not only research, but also curriculum and engineering content to a variety of audiences. Depending on the application, the content may need to be presented as a lecture, discussion, report, manual, video, or a variety of other media. Understanding to whom the content is being delivered, and determining the best way to present that data given the audience is a continuously developing skill for everyone in the engineering education space.
My background as an educator relied heavily on being able to effectively communicate to peers, supervisors, students, and industry professionals, all of which took slightly different communication styles to be effective. This training has prepared me for my current role at Purdue University, as well as my education. Continuing my work as an educator will allow me to take the skills I have already developed, and further tune them for yet another audience of academic scholars in the engineering education space.
Past and Current Work
Undergradute Studies
I have been fortunate in my professional career to have been able to experiment with a wide variety of communication media for an even wider range of audiences. Between working with elementary students in outreach events, teaching middle and high school students for multiple years in a mechatronics classroom, both technical college and university student populations, and working with industry professionals have prepared me to communicate with nearly any age range I may be presented with. I have also had the opportunity to work with many individuals with varying ranges of neurodiversity and other socio-economic factors. While studying at Michigan Tech, I was a tutor in the university’s ExSEL Program which focused on helping students that may struggle in a traditional college setting, where I primarily helped with the physics and computer science courses the students were taking.
K12 Education
While teaching mechatronics in Georgia, the majority of my students received free and reduced lunch due to the high poverty rate, and many of my students worked to support their families. Along with the wide range of neurodiversity and developmental maturity of my students, I focused on practical, problem based learning which taught the engineering principles needed to be successful in the discipline, but also time management and problem solving that would help the students regardless of their interests.
During 2020, I was teaching mechatronics at the high school and technical college level during the beginning and through many local peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced me to take a very hand-on program and make it virtual, but still find methods to keep the learning active and hands-on when possible. CAD tutorials became recorded videos with me sending 3-D printed designs to students. Lessons on industrial heaters and coolers became monitoring a student’s oven or refrigerator to determine the tolerances of the thermostats. Light and turbidity experiments became monitoring data from an automated home garden. Digital logic experiments became Minecraft worlds with Redstone. The pandemic added a lot of levels of complexity to how we teach engineering in the K-16 space. Fortunately, My peers and I were able to find creative and effective solutions to help students learn allowed students to stay active in their learning, and I was able to develop new skills in communication that I still use today.
Continuing work in University Settings
A skill that I am still actively working on is communicating asynchronously at scale. With the fundamentals lab that I run operating over twenty sections on multiple days, I need to find effective ways to get the same content to a large group of people so they all have an equitable experience in the lab. To assist with content presentation, I have developed slide templates that teaching assistants can use and modify to present to their sections, along with lab videos that go over the general principles of the labs. A class forum is hosted on Piazza, where students can ask questions, respond to others, or get feedback from teaching assistants. The forum allows for a wide array of knowledge to be available to everyone in the class regardless of when their lab occurs in the week. I have also automated the pre-lab portion of our lab using Variate, an online quiz tool, so students get immediate feedback on their calculations and simulations so they are prepared for Lab when they enter their section. These tools, along with a general lab manual has helped the lab run smoothly, even in my absence, which is very helpful with me taking on additional responsibilities and pursuing further education.
Future Work
Communication is a skill that I will be working on throughout my entire professional, and personal life. The main goal at hand is to have a communication protocol so teaching assistants can reach me and other lab coordinators once we spread out between the West Lafayette and Indianapolis campuses. This is going to be a large challenge to maintain continuity between our campuses, and ensure that all students, regardless of their location, receive an equitable education in electrical engineering. While this may be more of a logistical challenge over general communication, the communication between staff nor students will be able to be effective if a solid plan is not in place. While it will by no means be perfect, a plan of action will be developed by Fall 2024.
As an educator, I hope to further research in how we better communicate educational content to our K-16 students, a primary link to the teaching competency. Our ability as educators to communicate with students, and intern how we expect students to communicate with us, directly impacts how effective we are as educators. This becomes even more critical in technical fields such as science and engineering where not only do we need to communicate general concepts, but the needed background theory and mathematics that go with the concepts to ensure understanding.
Engage in Professional Development#
It is an obligation of a scholar in any space to stay up to date with current studies and practices of the filed. In Engineering Education and as an educator, my obligation to stay updated is even greater as I am facing students in an ever-chaining field on a daily basis. As an educator, it is my main responsibility to be able to effectively present information to students in the classroom or lab. As policies and practices in engineering and engineering education change, the courses and the labs that I maintain should change accordingly. Professional development not only enriches my knowledge base but also equips me with new tools and methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of laboratory instruction. It allows me to explore emerging trends, participate in workshops, and collaborate with peers, fostering a continuous learning mindset. This commitment to lifelong learning not only benefits my own professional growth but directly contributes to the enrichment of the educational experiences I facilitate for students pursuing engineering disciplines.
Past and Current Work
K12 Professional Development
As a K12 Educator in The United States, part of the annual contract of teachers is that they engage in professional development, the method of that development will vary depending on the teacher and the school. While I was a K12 educator, I did my fair share of formal professional development through teacher conferences and workshops, but it was often the informal tasks I assigned to myself that I learned the most about the latest technologies and teaching methods that I wanted to implement in my teaching.
When the Barrow Arts and Science Academy first opened, I had the opportunity develop a dual-credit course that provided both a computer science and an engineering credit for the students that took the course. While I had a fair amount of programming experience in a variety of languages, I was less experienced in Python, which is the programming language we decided would be the smoothest to implement in the program. In order to become more familiar with Python, I enrolled in a Python automation certificate program developed by Google. I thoroughly enjoyed the program, and it provided a lot of insight on how to effectively teach the language in a practical and meaningful way. Some students even took the course per my recommendation and found the certificate very valuable and used the certificate as a means to find a job to make some money before exploring further education.
University Professional Development
When I started my role as an Instructional Lab Coordinator at Purdue University, it was a very different environment compared to my work in the K12 space. I also started at Purdue in the spring of 2021, when Purdue was still using a variety of in-person and virtual teaching methods during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had the management skills needed at the time to run the labs I was assigned to, but I lacked the specific technical knowledge needed to use the equipment. The primary piece of equipment students were using in the lab at the time was the Analog Discovery 2 (AD2), a personal oscilloscope and power supply that students could use at home with minimal external tools. The AD2 allowed for students to learn different electronics measurement techniques at home, but I still needed to learn how to use the AD2 quickly so I could intern help the students. Over the span of about a week, I learned how to effectively use the AD2 in all the applications that students would use in the lab, and then some. One of the large challenges we have when getting the AD2s after the semester is ensuring they are still in working order for the next semester. I developed a script that was able to test an AD2 in all of its core functions and display any errors that might need to be addressed prior to redistribution. This task allowed me to get an even deeper understanding of the AD2, and made progress for an automation project that students could explore for bonus credit in the lab if they chose to.
Due to my roles in ECE, it is also part of my job to develop effective professional development opportunities for our instructional staff members and teaching assistants. With the help and feedback from our TAs, we are currently working on developing effective and efficient methods to train our new and returning TAs for future semesters. This has also developed a variety of leadership positions for TAs and allowed other instructional staff to branch into other interests and roles in the department.
Future Work
As an educator and a scholar in Engineering Education I hope to continue learning both in formal and informal settings on how to better myself and my knowledge base. It is difficult to say exactly what will be the next skill, principle or general lesson I will work on next, but I am almost certain I will be approaching the experience as an educator wanting to be able to share the experience in a practical way for my students or peers.
I am hoping to conduct research in the K16 space, primarily focusing on how our high schools can better prepare students for their transition into additional education or directly into the workspace. With the CHIPS and Science Act having such a high influence at Purdue and the research throughout the university, I hope to help develop practical professional learning experiences for teachers and educators that will help them better train our students to work with semiconductor electronics.
Participate Actively in Professional Communities#
I have an obligation to collaborate with other scholars in Engineering Education to both learn about experiences and research performed by others, and to also share my own experiences. Being part of these communities allows me to contribute to ongoing conversations, share my experiences, and foster connections that can prove invaluable in both my academic journey and future career. By interacting with fellow educators, industry professionals, and researchers, I gain invaluable insights into innovative teaching methodologies, emerging trends, and real-world applications of engineering principles. I have been fortunate to have a strong professional community around me in Purdue ECE where I have already learned and collaborated in a variety of ways, and look forward to expanding my professional network around the university, and the world.
Past and Current Work
K12 Networking
After I earned my physics degree from Michigan Tech, I had the opportunity to pursue a Master’s degree in teaching through the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship (Now Citizens and Scholars) in partnership with Piedmont College (now Piedmont University). This fellowship connected me to educators across the country focusing on bringing experienced STEM leaders into the classroom, primarily in high-needs schools and districts. Throughout my time in the fellowship, I worked with over one hundred educators in dozens of districts to promote STEM education and teacher leadership. I attended conferences and summits where experienced fellows discussed their times in the classroom through the fellowship and the impacts of the community after their obligations.
Through Piedmont College, I participated in the Piedmont Educator Renewal Conference, were educators from across the state of Georgia came to discuss their teaching methods and philosophies. I was a guest speaker for two sessions at this conference. The first session discussed how to address and promote discussion of science and technology misconceptions in the classroom, and the second session showed how teachers can automate their general lesson planning and keep track of curriculum standards using Google Sheets.
University Academic and Industry Networking
My work at Purdue university requires me to interact with academic and industry professionals on a daily basis. This enables me to create a strong professional network for discussing the expectations requirements that industries are expecting out of our students, along with powerful collaborators when developing new content for our instructional labs. Through professional connections with Keysight Technologies, Tektronix, National Instruments, Milwaukee Tool, and a variety of other industry-leading companies, I have been able to develop mutually-beneficial relationships for our programs at Purdue, our students looking for internships and full-time careers, and productive graduates that are able to merge and improve existing communities in these companies.
In order for me to develop effective labs for our students, I work closely with the faculty that run the lectures associated with the specific lab. This allows me to keep the content in-line with what is being discussed that week, and make sure that the labs build a practical foundation for the students to explore the math and theory discussed in the lecture. When I first started in this position, the labs were not aligned with the lectures, which led to the main complaint of the labs. Now that the current lab is aligned with the current lecture, it is time to bring on the other coordinators and faculty to ensure that there is continuity between future labs and courses.
Future Work
I hope to continue my work in developing connections with more industries to help provide feedback to our curriculum, along with becoming more involved in the academic discussion of instructional labs and fundamental engineering courses. Through these conversations, I hope to contribute to a productive bridge between the K12 education space and to introductory college courses along with a bridge between our fundamental engineering courses and the major-specific programs. Working with other professionals and universities to develop our fundamentals labs and courses will allow us to improve globally and stay academically competitive.
Create Knowledge#
Actively contributing to the creation of knowledge in Engineering Education is a compelling obligation. By engaging in research and scholarly activities, I not only deepen my own understanding of effective teaching practices but also contribute to the collective wisdom of the educational community. Creating knowledge and promoting this discourse allows me to address gaps in existing pedagogical approaches, explore innovative methodologies, and generate evidence-based insights that can inform both my own teaching practices and those of my colleagues.
Creating knowledge allows me to explore innovative approaches, assess the impact of various instructional strategies, and develop best practices that can be shared with fellow educators. Through research and knowledge creation, I hope to help shape the future of engineering education, ensuring that instructional labs are dynamic, engaging, and aligned with the evolving needs of students, industry, and the society we live in.
Past and Current Work
K12 Curriculum Development
While I was teaching high-school in Georgia, I was one out of three teachers in the state that was teaching a Mechtronics curriculum. This put me in a unique and difficult position. As a brand-new teacher, I was expected to develop a productive curriculum for our students while having limited oversight due to the lack of experience in the field from my supervisors and administration. Thankfully, Lanier Technical College was near by that hosted a Mechatronics program which gave me connections to instructional staff and industry professionals to help with the curriculum development. Over the next two years, the curriculum was developed and shared across the state to be used and implemented in a variety of contexts.
Barrow Arts and Science Academy (BASA) came online in the fall of 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The school started completely remotely, and I was asked to develop a new engineering and computer science program that would offer a dual credit in the fields. Finding ways to develop a hands-on program with students being at home and having a very limited access to materials became a unique challenge. The first few weeks allowed for exploration of CAD with the online tool OnShape. Students explored buoyancy and surface area with tin-foil boats and assorted weights such as coins or action figures. This virtual outlook also promoted students building a digital portfolio where they discussed the engineering design process in these different applications, a portfolio that many are still making throughout their high-school career.
Technical College Curriculum Development
Through my time collaborating with the instructional staff at Lanier Tech, I had the opportunity to teach a few classes at the technical college, primarily courses focusing on industrial instrumentation and AC Power. These courses had some of the curriculum already developed, but not completely. This allowed me to further my experience in the fields while also adding additional exploration for students in the classes, particularly in the sensors and motor controls space. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused these hands-on program to go remote, I had to redevelop the courses so they could be better implemented in a virtual setting. This placed a larger emphasis on simulation and down-scaling to focus on hobby-level electronics and sensors that students could obtain at home with minimal extra cost to the student.
University Lab Curriculum Development
Once I took over the electronics fundamentals lab that I now currently run, one of the first large tasks that was expected by staff and students alike was for the lab to be updated to better align with the lecture associated with the lab and to better prepare students for the ever-changing field of electronics. Changing the actual university expected outcomes of the lab was not an available adjustment at the time, which means I had to focus on how to address the same topics in a practical and meaningful way. This led to a larger emphasis on general concept exploration and personal projects. This way students would be more prepared to explore different topics regardless of their discipline while still developing a basic electronics background on the way.
With the semiconductor initiative in the Untied States, I have been tasked with helping develop a new summer curriculum that will take students from the very basics of elctronics, all the way to semiconductor chip design in about eight weeks. This was a difficult, yet enjoyable task. My task was to essentially find a way to take my entire fundamentals lab and compress it to five one-day labs. This put a large emphasis on effective measurements and practical applications of semiconductors. While measurements are a key part of nearly every lab in the traditional lab course, the emphasis was more placed on the digital measurements for the semiconductor course. The different semiconductor applications allowed us to look at a variety of MOSFET applications and even allow students to explore other topics they were interested. By the end of the first week, students were making RAM and light-chasing circuits with the basic knowledge they were able to develop in about a week. This provided a lot of evidence to how we can innovate current labs in the electronics space, and enforced my emphasis on personal exploration in the traditional lab.
Future Work
With most of my professional experience having revolved around curriculum development, I hope to continue this in a variety of different contexts, both professionally and in research. Developing curriculum to better prepare students in the K12 space for college or an immediate career is of the most interest to me, especially to how to promote different projects and problem-based learning to a wide range of students regardless of their socio-economic statuses.
Apply Engineering Education Principles#
Applying engineering education principles is foundational to my role and mission as a lab coordinator and educator. This involves not only providing hands-on experiences but also emphasizing critical thinking and problem-solving. Incorporating active learning strategies and real-world applications in the lab setting ensures that students not only grasp theoretical concepts but also develop the practical skills essential for success in the field. Embracing engineering education principles in my work allows for continuous improvement, as I can assess the effectiveness of different instructional approaches, refine methodologies, and contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning within the engineering education community. In doing so, I am not just facilitating lab sessions but actively contributing to the broader mission of preparing students to thrive in the dynamic field of engineering.
Past and Current Work
Developing Courses and Labs in the Technical College Space
While I was teaching high school in Georgia, I also taught mechatronics at Lanier Technical College. At Lanier Tech, I primarily taught Industrial Instrumentation, a course that focused on Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams along with developing sensor systems for industrial manufacturing. At the beginning of the course, in order to bring some of the concepts to bringing it closer to home, I conducted labs that focused on personal projects and home automation. This both introduced students to the concepts in the course while allowing them to explore different interests in ways that could help out themselves and their families. I still get contacted from former students who are excited to share their automated garden or home monitoring system, a favorite part of my day.
Developing Instructional Labs at the University Level
As I was redeveloping the electronics fundamentals lab for ECE, one of the main principles I wanted to emphasize what practical application and tinkering. Prior to the redevelopment, most students in ECE did not do personal projects, or any projects for that matter, until they reached their senior design or capstone course. This was evident from discussions with senior teaching assistants and students in senior design. One of my favorite parts of the day are now when students contact me asking to talk about different projects that they have in mind. The second project for the lab is now exploring applications of the 555 timer, a very popular timer chip among hobbyists and engineers alike due to its wide array of uses. As students submitted reports and videos, I received numerous emails expressing excitement and queries about other projects and applications. The great thing about this even was the contacts are coming from not just ECE students, but also those in the mechanical and industrial engineering majors.
Future Work
As I continue to develop curriculum and perform research in engineering education, one of the main topics that I would like to explore is learning through tinkering and play. I learned almost all of what I know about electronics thanks to my personal projects and tinkering with different electronics concepts. I would like to find different methods to promote this regardless of age range, as I feel it is extremely necessary for our future engineers to be comfortable tinkering with new and innovative ideas.
Synthesize Knowledge#
With the ever-evolving field of engineering as a whole, it is critical that scholars in engineering education compile extrapolate on the diverse concepts and methodologies throughout the entire field . Synthesizing knowledge allows me to integrate insights from various sources, including educational research, industry trends, and pedagogical advancements. I can then create a holistic understanding of effective instructional approaches within the context of laboratory settings. This synthesis not only aids in the development of comprehensive and well-rounded instructional strategies but also facilitates the seamless integration of theoretical concepts with practical applications.
As an instructional lab coordinator, the skill of synthesizing knowledge is instrumental in ensuring that the educational experiences I curate are not only informed by the latest advancements in engineering education but also tailored to meet the unique needs of the students and the evolving demands of the field. By integrating insights from research, best practices, and hands-on experiences, I can tailor instructional strategies to meet the unique needs of my students. It’s through this process of knowledge synthesis that I strive to elevate the educational experience for our students, preparing them for the challenges and innovations in the dynamic world, especially in the dynamic field of electrical and computer engineering.
Past and Current Work
Collecting and Using Student Data to Redevelop Instructional Labs
My first main task when taking my position at Purdue University was coordinating our ECE electronics fundamentals lab. I learned very quickly that students were not content with the current setup of the lab, and faculty were concerned that students were not learning what the students needed to be successful in future classes. Over the next few semesters, I interviewed over one hundred individuals including current students, teaching assistants, and faculty to see what should be improved with the current lab setup.
From a student perspective, the main concerns with the lab were about the time commitment needed for a one credit lab course and the fact that the labs did not align well with the lecture associated with the lab. Teaching assistants were concerned about the vague and sometimes arbitrary directions provided in the current manual with led to a lot of confusion and inconsistent instruction. Faculty were concerned about the skills that students were lacking in later labs, primarily with the use of oscilloscopes. Some of these concerns could be attributed to the adaptations that needed to be made to make a hybrid lab due to the COVID-19 pandemic, others were more systemic.
Over the next three semesters, experimental sections of the lab were implemented to test different labs and instructional methods. This ranged from different lab topics to different assessment methods such as different practical exam setups and exploration projects. Based on student and teaching assistant feedback, along with faculty evaluating the lab experience, the lab now follows much closer to the lecture, has a more practical approach to the topics, along with project assessments instead of practical exams.
Future Work
In order for me to be able to do my job as a lab coordinator effectively, along with conducting research in engineering education, I will need to be able to collect and assess data at scale. As I work on further labs, I will need to work with even more students, staff and faculty to ensure that the labs are effective for the students and can be effectively taught in a variety of formats and locations. I hope to continue research in the instructional lab space and how to develop labs to be even more effective for our students. As fields in ECE develop, especially in the semiconductor space, our instructional labs need to develop and improve as well.
Think Critically and Reflectively#
As an educator studying Engineering Education, cultivating critical thinking and reflective practices is paramount to my professional journey. By questioning assumptions, analyzing pedagogical approaches, and scrutinizing the effectiveness of instructional methods, I am better positioned to refine my teaching practices and promote a deeper understanding of engineering concepts. Embracing critical thinking and reflective practices not only enhances the quality of my teaching but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement that will hopefully spread to my students, teaching assistants, and fellow instructional staff.
Navigating the dynamic demand of instructional labs requires constant evaluation and adaptation. It is my obligation to my students to analyze the effectiveness of lab activities, question established norms, and explore innovative methodologies to enhance student learning experiences. Reflective thinking allows me to assess the outcomes of lab sessions, pinpoint areas of improvement, and refine my instructional strategies accordingly. Through these processes, I am better equipped to address the unique questions student dynamics, ensuring that the learning environment remains innovative, relevant, and aligned with the goals of engineering education. This approach not only enriches my professional development but also contributes to the continuous improvement of the educational experiences I facilitate for students pursuing engineering disciplines.
Past and Current Work
Instructional lab assessment and development
I have been working on redeveloping our fundamentals lab in ECE for about two years. In this time, I have been focusing on promoting practicality of the electronics principles through direct applications of the concepts along with small projects to show how the concepts work together. This redevelopment has been a slow and rigorous process due to gradual but productive steps that have been taken to ensure a smooth transition between the past setup and the setup we are now using.
The main issues with how the original lab was developed involved the student populations that were used to test the labs, and the lack of updates after the initial publication. The trial sections of the original lab were setup as honors courses and taken almost exclusively by ECE students. While there is nothing instructionally wrong with this approach, in my opinion, this population does not properly reflect the current student population of the lab which consists of only about 5% honors students, and nearly 40% of students that are not studying ECE subjects as a major. While the labs may have been successful with the specific population of students in the trial, when it was deployed to the general lab population, there was a lot of frustration and concern for the time the general student was expected to commit to the lab. After the authors of the original lab left their positions in ECE, they also ceased their support of the lab text, which still needed further updates and modifications to be effective for the students in the lab.
My understanding for the need of the redevelopment of the lab came from student and teaching assistant feedback when I first took over the lab. Over the next couple of semesters, I talked to over one hundred students and faculty that all had a hand in the lab to better understand the needs of the students both in and outside of the lab. This made me question the current setup of the lab and develop ideas on how to construct it in a more effective fashion. After three semesters of experimental sessions and manual edits, the latest version of the lab was developed and implemented in the fall of 2023.
This manual was by no means finished, which has been made abundantly clear from students and TAs alike. While there has been significant improvement in the labs productivity and engagement when compared to the past versions, there are still numerous places to make clarity and time-usage modifications. I have been very clear to my students and teaching assistants that I am more than welcome to feedback, which many have been open to providing. There have been times where the manual has been tweaked even a day before the students performed the lab after the TAs had time to run through the lab to make sure it was doable and effective in the necessary timeframe. I hope to continue this mindset, and promote the thought of continuous improvement to the next person that takes over the lab from me. The lab documents and instruction should not be in a static state, but should focus on continuously improving and adjusting to the current needs of the students.
Future Work
With much of my work and mindset for the instructional labs in ECE focused around continuous and practical improvement, I hope to further promote this to students and faculty alike that work with our labs. There is further talk of how we can better improve the continuity between the lectures and the labs for the fundamentals courses, which will likely take about two years to properly implement. The discussion should not stop at the fundamentals labs; however, and should permeate to all lectures and labs alike, creating a full cycle of continuous improvement throughout ECE. There is already a 5-semester cycle that is being developed in the instructional labs where we focus on a lab for five semesters, and then move on.
I would also like to perform research in how we can more effectively reflect on our instructional practices in our department, as this tends to be a topic that is not discussed at length right now. While we do have staff and faculty that are dedicated to the effective operations of our labs and some of our lectures, there is a disconnect between those individuals and the faculty that perform the vast majority of the instruction in the department. This is a long-time commitment that will likely take generations of staff and faculty to improve, but in my opinion, one of the most important discussions that need to be had in order to better our instruction for our students.