The 2009 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware was awarded today to two groups for the courseware SIMSE submitted by Emily Navarro and colleagues, and CATME/Team-Maker submitted by Matthew Ohland and colleagues.

The award was presented at the Premier Award Ceremony at the Frontiers in Education Conference, held this year in in San Antonio, Texas. The award-winning courseware was distributed on CD ROM at the FIE Conference and is also available online.This year’s panel of judges comprised a diverse cross-section of experts in engineering education and interactive media. Sponsors of the award program are John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Microsoft Research, Autodesk  and TechSmith.

SimSE is a game-based educational software engineering simulation environment that allows students to practice “virtual” software engineering processes in a graphical, interactive and fun setting. The direct, graphical feedback enables students to learn the complex cause and effect relationships underlying software engineering processes. During the game, the student takes on the role of the project manager and directs engineers to perform typical process tasks. SimSE helps bridge the gap between the conceptual knowledge about software engineering that is presented in lecture but that often times is not fully explored or practiced in assignments or projects. SimSE includes a customizable modeling environment that allows instructors to create new scenarios, application domains, organizations and cultures. SimSE has been used worldwide and has been found to be an educationally effective tool that increases students’ understanding of software engineering process concepts. Professor Emily Navarro was joined by professor André van der Hoek, both from the University of California at Irvine, in developing this award winning courseware.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME)/Team-Maker is an integrated and well-tested system that helps manage teams in engineering courses. Team-Maker is a tool for forming teams using instructors’ criteria, which helps instructors save time and effort in creating balanced teams. The Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) collects and analyzes self and peer evaluations of team members’ contributions, which provides faculty the feedback they need to manage teams in the classroom. CATME also provides students with tools that help them perform well on a team by providing incentives to contribute to the team, feedback about their performance, and suggests steps to improve their performance. CATME/Team-Maker are built upon a sound theory of teamwork that has been well tested both in terms of validity and reliability, and have been demonstrated to help students learn and perform better. Matthew W. Ohland, Purdue University was joined by a team of developers in accepting the award including: Lisa G. Bullard and Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University; Cynthia J. Finelli, University of Michigan; Richard A. Layton, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; Misty L. Loughry, Georgia Southern University; Hal R. Pomeranz, Deer Run Associates and Douglas G. Schmucker, Zahl-Ford, Inc.,

The Premier Award competition, hosted by the NEEDS/Engineering Pathway digital libraries, is open to a wide range of submissions of “high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.”  More details on the Premier Award and current and previous winners can be found on the Engineering Pathway at: http://www.engineeringpathway.org/ep/premier/

The Engineering Pathway is a portal to high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology and engineering technology, for use by K-12 and university educators and students. Engineering Pathway is the engineering education “wing” of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

Today in History - October 18, 1962 - Watson, Crick, and Wilkins receive Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA as a double helix. They first proposed their model for the structure of DNA in 1953. As this model was composed of two right-handed, antiparallel, polynucleotide chains coiled around a common axis it is sometimes referred to as the  double helix. They received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”.

Rosalind Franklin’s work was pivotal in the development of the understanding the structure of DNA as well. She discovered the existence of the A and B forms of DNA and her X-ray crystallographies clearly showed x-ray diffraction patterns of DNA. Alas Rosalind Franklin died of cancer in 1958 at the young age of 37, possibly due to expose to the X-rays she worked with. Watson, Crick and Wilson only recently credited her contributions as key to the development of their model of DNA. Many have speculated that sexism was the reason for not giving her more credit earlier. Regardless, Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously so this would not have changed the names on the 1962 award. For more information, see the Rosalind Franklin Society, whose goal is to honor the achievements of Rosalind Franklin by recognizing, fostering, and making known the important contributions of women in science.  “Franklin symbolizes progress for women in science — her contributions were not recognized during her lifetime or for many years after her death but today her work is highlighted in textbooks around the world. “

Today, women make up over 50% of the medical school students and women students are reaching parity in bioengineering and biomedical engineering as well - yet they are still less than 10% of the medical and engineering faculty. A recent study of the National Academies titled Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering found unintentional biases were a major contributor to the low number of women on our science and engineering faculties. Women face barriers to hiring and promotion in research universities in many fields of science and engineering — a situation that deprives the United States of an important source of talent as the country faces increasingly stiff global competition in higher education, science and technology, and the marketplace. Eliminating gender bias in universities requires immediate, overarching reform and decisive action by university administrators, professional societies, government agencies, and Congress. The report was motivated by former Harvard President Larry Summers’ speculation that the low numbers of women in science and engineering are because women don’t want to work hard enough and that there may be a biological basis. His discounted discrimination as a tertiary factor.

See the Engineering Pathway’s Bioengineering / Biomedical Engineering Community site or our resources on Rosalind Franklin, Engineering Diversity site and our resources on gender equity.

Also on this date, October 18, 1955, the antiproton is discovered. See our related resources on antimatter.

Today in History - October 4, 1957 - Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, into space at the peak of the Cold War.

View our Sputnik resources, as well as related resources in Aerospace Engineering. Students can learn about careers in Aerospace Engineering, learn about aircraft dynamics, or simulate gas turbines. Faculty can visit our Aerospace Engineering Education Community site, browse resources in a range of aerospace and related courses and catch up on the latest news and events.

Also on this day in history in 2004, the SpaceShipOne wins Ansari X Prize and in 1913 the Steel Treaters’ Club is founded. See the Engineering Pathway’s resources on humans in space. Or Scott Chumbley’s blog on the history of the American Society for Metals (ASM).

Today in History - September 27, 2003 - The first European mission to the moon was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 exploration probe, along with two commercial satellites. It took 15 months to reach lunar orbit, covered over 60 million miles with only 13 gallons of fuel. After being captured by lunar gravity in November 2004, the 170-lb probe scanned the Moon for over 30 months to gain more information about the chemical composition of the Moon and whether it contains water. Powered by a revolutionary new “ion drive”, a solar-powered engine, its cost was only £70 million, much less expensive than that of U.S. space missions. The SMART-1 crashed into lunar soil in September 2006 at the end of its successful mission. The image in the upper right is an artist’s impression of the trajectory of the SMART-1 spacecraft in the final phase of its mission.

Interested readings may want to read Arianne Agogino Gieringer’s blog of December 24 on the first Ariane rocket launch. As she points out, the Ariane rocket continues to be one of the premier commercial satellite launching systems in the world today.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on the SMART-1 mission, rockets and aerospace engineering. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

Also on this date in history in 1816, the first Stirling engine is patented. And in 1910 a key patent is issued for the production of ammonia by Frtiz Haber and Robert Le Rossingnol.

This patent could produce ammonia on a large scale directly from its component gases of hydrogen and nitrogen. Fritz Haber (right photo above) went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this invention in 1918.

For curricular resources, visit the Mechanical Engineering Education and Chemical Engineering Education community sites.

Today in History - September 7, 1998 - Google is founded. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at  Stanford and collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. They decided that the BackRub name doesn’t quite have the buzz needed and came up with  Google - a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google says that the use of the term “reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”

The door to Google’s original Menlo Park office (left photo above) came with a remote control because it was attached to the garage of a friend,  Susan Wojcicki,  who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three - Larry and Sergey hired Craig Silverstein as their first employee, a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford. Google moved to its current world headquarters in January of 2004 - the Googleplex, an office complex with cafeterias with free food, laundry machines,  bicycles, and a creative work environment (right photo above). Google went public on August 18, 2004 with a market capitalization of $23 billion. Some of its employees became instant  paper millionaires (center photo above).

Google Earth was launched on June 28, 2005.  The verb, to “google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006. Fortune Magazine names Google as the best company to work for in 2007. Google’s new Green Initiatives include clean energy, reducing our footprint, efficient computing, employee programs and tools for users.  Google Labs continues to test out a wide range of innovative approaches, strategies and algorithms that define the future of media.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Google and  internet search engines. For related educational resources, visit the computing disciplinary communities.