Program encourages retention

By: Abid Mujtaba

Posted: 11/8/07

Brandon Blamer - nuclear, Jacob Hughes - civil, Kyle Benson - aerospace, Rumki Mannan - biomedical and Zhassymbek Shynggys - petroleum are members of Team 9. They have a group on Facebook and, no, they are not an indoor soccer team. They are freshmen engineering students who are part of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics Talent Extension Program, STEP.

STEP is an endeavor initiated in 2004 by the College of Engineering in collaboration with the departments of mathematics and physics to increase the retention rates of freshmen engineering students after the first year.

The program is implemented by Texas A&M in collaboration with the Texas Engineering Experiment Station with a funding of $2 million to date from the National Science Foundation.

A freshman engineering student will enroll in ENGR 111, MATH 151 and PHYS 218 simultaneously in their first semester. They will be assigned to a team with whom they will take all three courses.

"The focus for the college of engineering, primarily, is to get students to think about engineering tasks when they walk in to an engineering class and to see how mathematics and physics are used in carrying out these tasks," said Arun Srinivasa, director of STEP and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

STEP attempts to emphasize how engineering, mathematics and physics have a large body of common knowledge to which they each bring a different perspective.

"The math class starts off with vectors, so we tend to do a project in week three [in ELEN 111] that uses vectors, while simultaneously the students are studying kinematics in PHYS 218 which uses vectors immediately," he said. "You can see how the three things are aligned…we want to make sure that the connections are evident."

"We want to give the students a task-oriented approach towards engineering [right from their freshman courses]," said Srinivasa. "We need to get the students to build something."

Don Maxwell, coordinator of the

ELEN 111 and ELEN 112 courses said, "Right now I'm doing a robotics project. The first step of it is invention: it rolls, it works. Then it has to be converted into something that meets specifications."

Students are asked to build a robot that will transport a full, upright coke can on a winding path up an inclined plane. When they inevitably fail on their first attempt, they are asked to "calculate the angle at which it flips over…[N]ow it needs a gear-train so they learn about forces and torques," Maxwell said.

"From a student's point of view, they get to see what engineers do," Srinivasa said. It also provides the students with an opportunity to review their career choice, "It helps them sort out what they want to do."

Maxwell said they wanted students to have the right perception of what engineers do. The real reason for a college education is not to make money, but to find a career that you are going to enjoy, he said.

As of 2006, all of the nearly 1,600 students that enroll in ELEN 111 every year are divided into teams of four students and introduced to engineering by a problem-based approach.

Teams are expected to report on the project's progress via memos, preparing the students for technical writing. A variety of projects, each with some societal importance and tailored to the particular type of engineering a student is enrolled in, give a preview of what is to come in the following years.

Srinivasa said, "Definitely the ELEN 111 and 112 class[es do] involve quite a bit of effort from the students, building something that behaves in a predictable fashion is not simple...but [with] anything like robotics, students [will always] have a blast." The departments assign teaching assistants and peer teachers, offer tutoring and summer schooling to help students cope with the work-load and ease students into the field of engineering.

William H. Bassichis, who coordinates STEP in the physics department, outlined the two main problems that surface when trying to teach physics to engineering students.

"One is to make Physics relevant for an engineering student. [It is] not just an impediment to their becoming an engineer [as they seem to think,] but it's a necessary tool for an engineer. We do this mostly in the lab," he said.

Bassichis said physics labs have been tailored to increase cross-referencing between physics and engineering labs.

"They want to build a truss bridge in their engineering project. When they need it, [the PHYS 218 lab has] a tensile strength lab measuring the tensile strength between the little magnet things they use to build their bridges," Bassichis said.

"[The second problem] they have is that we could make physics fun, relevant and entertaining and they will flunk out in their sophomore year," he said.

His book on mechanics for PHYS 218 Don't Panic was written for engineering students to prepare them for their sophomore year.

"It is not entertaining, there are no colored pictures [and] there are no essays. They have to read every word, essentially; work every problem," he said.

It is not surprising that popular tutoring services outside the campus put out advertisements with the subtitle "Extra charge for Bassichis."

Mitchell Martin, senior mechanical engineering student and a peer teacher for ELEN 111, said, "When students come to me saying that Don't Panic is challenging…all I ever tell them is that it is worth the effort. Mastering concepts from Don't Panic has taken me into [my] senior year of mechanical engineering."

In a STEP survey, 90 percent of 250 students polled in an ELEN 112 said the course helped them to understand the need for mathematics and physics in the field of engineering. Eighty-five percent said that they now knew what engineers do. In a follow-up survey of 150 students, 80 percent said that ELEN 111 and 112 were helpful in later courses.

Statistics collected by the Office of Institutional Studies and Planning show that the freshman retention rate has increased to 74.4 percent in 2006 as compared to 66.8 percent in 2001.

"The question of retention rates is too complex to be attributed to a single cause, but we feel that we are making a difference," Srinivasa said.

Mannan, from Team 9, said being in a team and taking three courses with the same people is more efficient.

"We just get together and study one subject," Blamer said, "and then switch to another one without having to get up and join a different study-group."