• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.76-93
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• 2008

Co-operative (Co-op) education is a college program that integrates classroom studies with paid, productive and real-life work experience. A mandatory Co-op program for the degree is introduced with a sample curriculum from the Mechanical Engineering program at University of the Pacific. The mandatory Co-op program requires a minimum of 7 months of work experience with the option of pursuing a 12 month program. Students also have the opportunity of participating in an Engineering Industry Fellowship (EIF) program or an International Engineering Co-op program (IECP). University of the Pacific has engineering programs in Bio-Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Management, Engineering Physics, and Mechanical Engineering. All the programs are ABET-accredited except the Bio-Engineering program, which is relatively new. The Co-op employers evaluate the Co-op students at the end of the working period before returning to school, and the students also provide an evaluation of their Co-op experience. Co-op employer evaluations of student work are used in ABET assessment methods developed by the Mechanical Engineering program at University of the Pacific.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.68-75
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• 2021

ABEEK recommends convergent engineering projects to nurture creative problem-solving ability for 1st year engineering students through 'Creative Engineering Design' course. However, 1st year engineering students, who have not yet studied core subjects in engineering, have difficulties understanding and coping with the challenges posed by the engineering-related projects. For this reason, the educational objectives of this course are usually frustrating to achieve by the instructor. In this paper, by using the problem-solving process and skills of critico(-creative) thinking, we prepare guidelines for creative engineering design education that allow 1st-year students to effectively participate in engineering projects without a complete understanding of the design process which is to be studied. Also, we present a case study that applies the guidelines to an on-going creative engineering design course and discusses the outcomes by showing student-generated works. The results showed that the intuitive content and everyday expression of critico(-creative) thinking education enabled the instructor to effectively guide their students through the requirements of engineering projects without relying on advanced engineering design methods, and that the application of these guidelines also helped improve students' communication skills, including presentation. We show that the guidelines for creative engineering design education utilizing the problem-solving process and skills of critico(-creative) thinking is not only contributing to achieving the educational objectives of the creative engineering design course but can also be an educational paradigm that incorporates critico(-creative) thinking education into engineering education.

• The Korean Journal of Health Service Management
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.129-144
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• 2017

Objectives : To review a Tanzanian medical engineering education program and determine improvement measures for the Official Development Assistance (ODA) healthcare projects. Methods : A consultation of the Tanzanian medical engineering education program funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRFK) was reviewed. An on site survey, an environmental analysis, and in-depth interviews were performed. Results : Survey results highlighted a lack of medical device education and the low operating rate of medical equipment. The need to establish educational program was thus confirmed. The expansion of healthcare facilities appeared to be limited within the current medical management system. A master coursework plan for Tanzania medical engineering was developed. Conclusions : The needs of medical engineering education were recognized. A plan and curriculum were developed. The medical engineering education program should be planned and budgeted prior to the ODA healthcare program.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.4510-4526
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• 2017

Most available methods of facial gender recognition work well under a constrained situation, but the performances of these methods have decreased significantly when they are implemented under unconstrained environments. In this paper, a method via low-rank and collaborative representation is proposed for facial gender recognition in the wild. Firstly, the low-rank decomposition is applied to the face image to minimize the negative effect caused by various corruptions and dynamical illuminations in an unconstrained environment. And, we employ the collaborative representation to be as the classifier, which using the much weaker $l_2-norm$ sparsity constraint to achieve similar classification results but with significantly lower complexity. The proposed method combines the low-rank and collaborative representation to an organic whole to solve the task of facial gender recognition under unconstrained environments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks including AR, CAS-PERL and YouTube are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms, our method has overwhelming superiority in the aspects of accuracy and robustness.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.845-860
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• 2017

It is very important to study displacement prediction in geotechnical engineering. Nowadays, the grey system method, time series analysis method and artificial neural network method are three main methods. Based on the brief introduction, the three methods are analyzed comprehensively. Their merits and demerits, applied ranges are revealed. To solve the shortcomings of the artificial neural network method, a new prediction method based on new evolutionary neural network is proposed. Finally, through two real engineering applications, the analysis of three main methods and the new evolutionary neural network method all have been verified. The results show that, the grey system method is a kind of exponential approximation to displacement sequence, and time series analysis is linear autoregression approximation, while artificial neural network is nonlinear autoregression approximation. Thus, the grey system method can suitably analyze the sequence, which has the exponential law, the time series method can suitably analyze the random sequence and the neural network method almostly can be applied in any sequences. Moreover, the prediction results of new evolutionary neural network method is the best, and its approximation sequence and the generalization prediction sequence are all coincided with the real displacement sequence well. Thus, the new evolutionary neural network method is an acceptable method to predict the measurement displacements of geotechnical engineering.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.31-42
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• 2020

This study aims to analyze the research trends of female engineering students focused on domestic research and to suggest implications for future researches. For this purpose, 67 domestic researches (academic articles & graduate theses) which were published since 1996 were collected using the academic research information service and the National Assembly Library search service. All of these 67 researches have been reviewed and classified according to analytical criteria such as publication year, research method, journal's research field and research subjects. Our findings show that firstly, related research on female engineering students has been growing since 1996. Secondly, there were more researches of both academic journals and graduate theses, using quantitative method compared to those with the other research methods. Thirdly, the research themes could be classified as follows: gender-awareness, female engineering students'(hereafter, FES) psychological variables, customized education for FES, career related variables, FES's properties and counselling for them. Fourth, regarding the result of analysis on the research topic, 41.79% of the researches were related to FES's 'career' related factors as well as diverse correlates. Based on these findings, it is necessary to continue studying on FES using various research methods as well as adopting different research perspectives. Also, practical and educational treatments for FES are required with particular attention to their individual variables.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2012

Communication skills, such as writing documents and presenting technical details, are thought to be essential for modern engineers. Engineering students usually have less interest in writing and presentation than their humanities student counterparts and their concerns are different, too. So it is necessary to teach them in a different way which is suited to them. However, teaching such subjects has been a tricky problem for educators in terms of teaching methods. Also, to teach writing and presentation effectively for engineering students, collaboration between the faculties of different disciplines is necessary because each discipline has its own specific domain knowledge and approaches. But many unsolved problems exist with regard to how to deal with the technical and administrative aspects, and so on. This paper introduces one case in the education of technical writing and presentation, which is a collaboration between an engineering faculty and a faculty of literature. The literature faculty conducts basic education and training for writing skills, while the engineering faculty teaches the technical aspects of documentation, as well as presentation skills. The focus is placed on topics such as self-introduction, searching technical literature and materials, describing and explaining things and presentation practice, etc. During the class there is cooperation in each topic domain, while the faculties collaborate in teaching and evaluation.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.74-88
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• 2019

In recent years, the design has formed and operated convergence education in conjunction with many other academic fields, and ABEEK also encourages the participation of convergence engineering programs. The purpose of this study is to require design and software convergence major to operate program that accord engineering education certification criteria to develop a program outcomes evaluation system and examine its validity. The program outcomes evaluation system was developed in accordance with development research methods and procedures. As a result, developed evaluation system program outcomes for convergence-based program outcomes: convergence ability, creative thinking ability, entrepreneur ability, and design ability. Finally, it revised and supplemented them through expert validity examine. Expert validity review included 9 experts in engineering, IT engineering, education technology, and design. The validity, usefulness, intelligibility, universality, and explanatory power of the evaluation system were reviewed. The results of this study are expected to provide practical tools for operating ABBEK of convergence programs between design and engineering.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.22-35
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• 2023

As information and communication technology has developed remarkably, it has become possible to analyze various types of large-volume data generated at a speed close to real time, and based on this, reliable value creation has become possible. Such big data analysis is becoming an important means of supporting decision-making based on scientific figures. The purpose of this study is to develop a big data analysis tool that can analyze large amounts of data generated through engineering education. The tasks of this study are as follows. First, a database is designed to store the information of entries in the National Creative Capstone Design Contest. Second, the pre-processing process is checked for analysis with big data analysis tools. Finally, analyze the data using the developed big data analysis tool. In this study, 1,784 works submitted to the National Creative Comprehensive Design Contest from 2014 to 2019 were analyzed. As a result of selecting the top 10 words through topic analysis, 'robot' ranked first from 2014 to 2019, and energy, drones, ultrasound, solar energy, and IoT appeared with high frequency. This result seems to reflect the current core topics and technology trends of the 4th Industrial Revolution. In addition, it seems that due to the nature of the Capstone Design Contest, students majoring in electrical/electronic, computer/information and communication engineering, mechanical engineering, and chemical/new materials engineering who can submit complete products for problem solving were selected. The significance of this study is that the results of this study can be used in the field of engineering education as basic data for the development of educational contents and teaching methods that reflect industry and technology trends. Furthermore, it is expected that the results of big data analysis related to engineering education can be used as a means of preparing preemptive countermeasures in establishing education policies that reflect social changes.

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.12-19
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• 2014

Failure is an important part of engineering practice. Engineers utilize all of their competences and resources in order for their products or processes to meet the initial intention and purpose, and not to fail. However, the technological products sometimes end up with failure. The failure, in many cases, is related to non-technological factors or systems, not just limited to technological factors. Moreover, the evaluation of failure is performed by a variety of agents, including consumers, civic groups, government as well as professional groups. Thus, this study raises an issue that the existing concept of failure, which focuses on the operation of function, is not sufficient enough to properly cover the success or failure of technology required by the modern society. In the recent trends of engineering, new concepts and methods have been developed by expanding the traditional concept or introducing a new perspective of failure, so that engineering failure can be better understood in the mutual relationship between technology and society. This research attempts to suggest a methodology of how the failure of engineering can be utilized and properly combined in the major education, design education and engineering ethics education. Also, it aims to contribute to the quality improvement of engineering education to train engineers who can lead the society with responsibility as well as professional competence.