Category / Education Research

by shannonchance

RoboSlam–Extended Version

Yesterday the students who built robots with the crew coordinated by Drs. Ted Burke and Damon Berry headed over to DIT’s Bolton Street location to learn about mechanical, industrial, and product design. Thanks to Kevin Delaney, Ger Reilly, Susan O’Shaughnessy and crew for a fascinating day! I’ll be posting lots more photos of RoboSlam in the days to come.  It’s been such fun!

Refining the electronics…
…and tweaking placement of the sensors.
Creating bodies…
…and making sure they fit the chassis and electronic components.

by shannonchance

Another Hampton University Success Story

I’d also meant to share a Facebook post Chris Torres made several weeks ago.  He won an impressive award for journalism.  I’m thrilled to find I advised him well!

Facebook post by Christopher Torres.

Facebook post by Christopher Torres.

by shannonchance

Photo Show and Lecture — Please Attend

I have a lecture and photo showings that you’re most welcome to attend:

I will be giving a talk at Arcadia University in Dublin tonight (May 15) at 4:00PM.  The address is:

Arcadia University, College of Global Studies
20 Fishamble Street
1-4 The Courtyard
Temple Bar
Dublin 8

Tomorrow night (May 16) I’ll host an open house of my photo exhibit from 5-7 at  Notre Dame’s O’Connell House.  That address is:

58 Merrion Square
Dublin 2

You can visit the photo show any weekday 9-5 through May 31 — it’s free and open to the public!  If you want to view it with me, I’ll also be in from 12-2 on May 22 and 27.  Moreover, you can email me (shannonchance at wm dot edu) to let me know if you’d like me to meet you there at another time that’s convenient for you.

"Essence of Beauty" is one of the photos on display at Notre Dame's O'Connell House now through May 31.

“Essence of Beauty” is one of the photos on display at Notre Dame’s O’Connell House now through May 31. Copyright Shannon Chance.

 

by shannonchance

Luanna’s New Master’s

It’s such a joy to keep in touch with people back in the States on Facebook.

Yesterday, Luanna Jendrey, who took the “Planning for Sustainability” course I offered in the summer of 2011, posted a picture from her recent graduation.  The photo was taken with former Fulbright Dr. Pam Eddy, who you’ll recall visited me here in March.

Luanna’s kind caption made my day even more special!  Kristina Neuhart took the 2011 class, too, and also offered kind words.

Congratulations to Luanna on her new Master’s degree in Higher Education!

Luanna's very sweet Facebook post.

Luanna’s very sweet Facebook post.

by shannonchance

Slammin’

We are running a RoboSlam robot hacking workshop with high school (transition year) students here in Ireland. Having great fun and learning circuitry, programming, and lots more!

20130514-121651.jpg

by shannonchance

PBL Credits in Águeda

Past projects made by students...

Projects that students made in past years at the engineering school in Agueda.

I misunderstood the credit allotment for projects at Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda.  As it turns out, the project design courses carry credits in keeping with architecture design courses in the States.  Jose sent me this explanation:

Hi Shannon, 

Good to hear from you, and thanks for sharing your blogpost.
I am afraid, though, that you didn’t get the project dynamics right. Projects are awarded, on average, 6 ECTS, which is more than they get for each of the supporting courses (we call them that, too), which tend to have 3ECTS each. At the end of the semester, the groups of students have to write a report and there’s a public discussion of their work, before a panel that includes the project supervisor and, usually, an external member (from another HE institution or from industry). Students get individual grades for their project work. 
 
In fact, the number of credits associated with project work (exclusively, not including the supporting courses) in the program is roughly 30% of the total number of credits.
 
Cheers,
 
José
by shannonchance

PBL at the Polytechnic School of Águeda

The audience was composed of experts and students in engineering and education.

The audience was composed of experts and students in engineering and education.

Visiting Portugal’s University of Aveiro some weeks ago provided me opportunities to speak with doctoral students and professors of engineering and education.

After I delivered a formal presentation to a small but enthusiastic group at the University of Aveiro’s Department of Education, my host, José Manuel Nunes de Oliveira drove me to the University’s satellite campus, known as the Polytechnic School of Águeda (or Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Universidade de Aveiro) where he teaches engineering.

Jose and his colleagues use Problem-Based Learning to teach engineering students.  They have formatted their classrooms to support group-based learning.  (My DIT colleague, Gavin Duffy, visited Jose and his campus earlier in the year to see how they use space. He wanted their advice to help in the programming phase of DIT’s new engineering facilities.)

What impressed me most in touring the buildings and grounds of the Águeda campus, though, was that the students were all working in groups–and that they seemed to be doing so on every type of project.

Jose says that after the teachers introduce the group-learning approach in the first year, students embrace it and want to do everything this way.

I thought that Jose said that students receive credit for their topic courses (i.e.,those with specific engineering content), but not for their project work (I was wrong, as I explain in my subsequent blog). In architecture we refer to these technical/topic classes as “support courses.”

All the courses a students take in a semester at the Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda help support the project they have been asked to do in groups. They are able to apply what they learn in the projects they design… but they don’t get formal credit for the design activities. In architecture in the USA, the design activities are assigned the most credit (typically 5-6 credit hours per semester) while each support course is generally worth just 3 credits. The architecture community tends to value the project or “design studio” work above all else.

Engineering students working together
Jose showed me around the various classroom and group-work spaces.
Students and teachers…
…can check out keys fro each space.
Student discussion
Example equipment
Lab
Lab
Materials storage
Group-learning lab
Group-learning lab
Most equipment they have is actual scale (i.e., the real thing) but this one is a model.
Students working together
Students working together
Students working together
Students (and teacher) working together
Group-learning lab
Past projects made by students…
…usually in groups.
Another past project
Another past project
Even the business students on this campus work in teams.
Here, students work in the cafeteria.
Robots available for use in the machine shop/testing lab.
Past projects stored in the in the machine shop/testing lab.
Past projects
Past projects
Equipment in the in the machine shop/testing lab.
This so reminds me of my days in architecture school…
…I learned to use all this equipment…
…and I machined parts of an airplane I was building with my dad.
I loved working in the wood and metal machine shops.
A project under development
A project under development
Faculty offices — they clearly work together, too, based on the arrangement of desks!
by shannonchance

My Interview about the Fulbright Inter-Country Lecturing Program

The Fulbright staff in Belgium interviewed me during my visit.  They asked me to describe some of my experiences with the program and explain how I got involved in it.

I hope the interview is helpful to other Fulbright scholars and to academics who would like to invite Fulbright scholars to speak at their institutions.

And, I hope my friends will enjoy hearing about what I was up to during my recent travels in Portugal and Belgium as well.

by shannonchance

Student-Centered and Urban: Architectural Education at IST

The second stop of my Fulbright Inter-Country Lecturing visit was to the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST). One of the organizers of the day, José Figueiredo, explained to me that IST “is the biggest and oldest engineering school in Portugal.”

Professor Teresa Heitor lined up all kinds of fascinating events for me.  The 60 first year architecture students presented their work to me (in English!).  Then, they came along as their professors gave me a tour of all the architecture studios.  We got a glimpse of what these particular students will encounter in the coming years, as they progress through the five-year architecture program at IST.

Their architectural education will be structured very, very much like ours in the USA.

Their design assignments will be quite similar as well, although the projects students encounter here do tend to have more of an urban focus than most programs I’ve visited in the US.  (I serve on architectural accrediting teams and have visited many different schools in the US through conferences as well as accreditation visits.  I have to say, however, that my home institution–Hampton University–has done a noteworthy job over the past decade of integrating urbanism into the curriculum.  Of that, I have been proud.)

At IST, I was particularly impressed with what I learned from the first year professors.  They’re doing a great job overcoming what I see as a big weakness in architectural education today.  So many teachers around the globe focus on teaching students to make “signature buildings” and “modernist masterpieces” that other architects will love.

These teachers, instead, endeavor to draw out their students’ unique interests and abilities.  Unlike the many teachers who seemingly want to “wipe the slate clean”, these professors seek to help students draw from the wealth of experience and knowledge they bring to the first year design studio.

They do lots of collaborative design at IST…
…every year they have a week-long design event where teams of students work together to create a design like this…
…teams for that include one student from each year (1-5).
The first year architecture instructors here…
…do a great job implementing “student-centered” approaches to teaching…
…they try hard to avoid instilling their own aesthetic values in students.
On the other hand, they do instill values regarding urbanism…
…and urban design problems happen in each year of this architecture program.
The second year includes some classic assignments of analysis…
…and more intimately (i.e., smaller) scaled design problems.
In fifith year, students can do either an individual thesis, or an organized design studio (as shown here).
Here’s a project for third year where students analyzed famous buildings.
I also had the chance to meet with the many architecture PhD students at IST.
And learn about the research projects they are doing.
This student was fascinated by the beehive roofs in the town she spent holidays as a child…
…and today she is studying this topic for her dissertation.
At the end of the day, I delivered a lecture/workshop on research paradigms and group learning…
…to architecture and engineering teachers and doctoral-level students.
by shannonchance

Problem-Based Learning — Live in Setúbal

In Problem-Based Learning, participants work in groups to: explore a problem, determine what they need to know to understand the problem, identify sources they can use, formulate hypotheses, and begin designing responses to the “problem” they’ve been presented.

In the PBL workshop Bill Williams and I conducted in Setúbal, there were three teams working to address the “problem” of how to integrate PBL into one of the institutions’ engineering programs.

These photos show the groups working together.  Participants in this workshop included engineering students, engineering teachers, and members of the central administration.

The room set up worked pretty well…
…but would have been even better if the groups could have met in circles…
…instead of rows.
The rows works for groups of four, but not so well for five.
The participants here were highly engaged.
And they came up with some excellent ideas.