Skip to main content
College of Engineering

College Hosts ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference; Dr. James Peyton Jones Wins “Best Paper”

The College of Engineering welcomed 75 members of the regional engineering education community to the American Society for Engineering Education Fall 2010 Middle Atlantic Section Conference, hosted on Villanova’s campus October 15 and 16.

“In the past 20 years, there has been a flood of research on how students learn engineering and how engineering education can be improved. I believe we are starting to reach that critical tipping point of having enough evidence to support changes in engineering that are truly transformative,” says Dr. Gary Gabriele, Drosdick Endowed Dean of the College of Engineering.

This year’s theme, “Engineering Education in the Next Decade,” connected 10 sessions organized into the following categories:

  • Incorporating Problem-based Learning Strategies into the Classroom
  • Novel Sustainable Engineering Curricula and Courses
  • Implementing New Technologies in the Engineering Classroom (two sessions)
  • Evaluation of Learning Styles and Novel Teaching Pedagogy
  • Teaching Toward the Next Decade: the Importance of Professional Skills
  • A Potpourri of Novel Engineering Experiences
  • Engineering Outreach: Activities from Service Learning, K-12, and High School Teacher Training
  • Global Engineering: Engineering Collaborations beyond the United States
  • Creating a Successful Design Education Experience

College of Engineering faculty authored 15 of the conference’s 40 papers. Twenty-three members of the faculty presented at the conference, in many cases working in interdisciplinary teams. Several undergraduate and graduate students also presented alongside faculty members.

Dr. James Peyton Jones, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics and Control, and ECE student co-authors Connor McArthur and Tyler Young were awarded the prize for best paper for their work entitled “From Design to Implementation with Simulink and LEGO NXT.”

The conference was organized by an interdisciplinary group of faculty including Dr. Pritpal Singh, Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who also chaired the committee; Dr. Robert Caverly, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Dr. Ronald Chadderton, Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Dr. Noelle Comolli, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering; and Dr. Aaron Wemhoff, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering.