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- All Subjects: engineering
- Creators: Ganesh, Tirupalavanam
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
The project was aimed towards middle school and high school students, as this is the estimated level where they learn biology and chemistry—key subject material in biomedical engineering. The high school students were given presentations and activities related to biomedical engineering. Additionally, within classrooms, posters were presented to middle school students. The content of the posters were students of the biomedical engineering program at ASU, coming from different ethnic backgrounds to try and evoke within the middle school students a sense of their own identity as a biomedical engineer. To evaluate the impact these materials had on the students, a survey was distributed before the students’ exposure to the materials and after that assesses the students’ understanding of engineering at two different time points. A statistical analysis was conducted with Microsoft Excel to assess the influence of the activity and/or presentation on the students’ understanding of engineering.
Based on findings of previous studies, there was speculation that two well-known experimental design software packages, JMP and Design Expert, produced varying power outputs given the same design and user inputs. For context and scope, another popular experimental design software package, Minitab® Statistical Software version 17, was added to the comparison. The study compared multiple test cases run on the three software packages with a focus on 2k and 3K factorial design and adjusting the standard deviation effect size, number of categorical factors, levels, number of factors, and replicates. All six cases were run on all three programs and were attempted to be run at one, two, and three replicates each. There was an issue at the one replicate stage, however—Minitab does not allow for only one replicate full factorial designs and Design Expert will not provide power outputs for only one replicate unless there are three or more factors. From the analysis of these results, it was concluded that the differences between JMP 13 and Design Expert 10 were well within the margin of error and likely caused by rounding. The differences between JMP 13, Design Expert 10, and Minitab 17 on the other hand indicated a fundamental difference in the way Minitab addressed power calculation compared to the latest versions of JMP and Design Expert. This was found to be likely a cause of Minitab’s dummy variable coding as its default instead of the orthogonal coding default of the other two. Although dummy variable and orthogonal coding for factorial designs do not show a difference in results, the methods affect the overall power calculations. All three programs can be adjusted to use either method of coding, but the exact instructions for how are difficult to find and thus a follow-up guide on changing the coding for factorial variables would improve this issue.
Self-efficacy in engineering, engineering identity, and coping in engineering have been shown in previous studies to be highly important in the advancement of one’s development in the field of engineering. Through the creation and deployment of a 17 question survey, undergraduate and first year masters students were asked to provide information on their engagement at their university, their demographic information, and to rank their level of agreement with 22 statements relating to the aforementioned ideas. Using the results from the collected data, exploratory factor analysis was completed to identify the factors that existed and any correlations. No statistically significant correlations between the identified three factors and demographic or engagement information were found. There needs to be a significant increase in the data sample size for statistically significant results to be found. Additionally, there is future work needed in the creation of an engagement measure that successfully reflects the level and impact of participation in engineering activities beyond traditional coursework.