George Mason KEEN on new teaching mindsets

Nathan Kahl — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:45:14 +0000

George Mason KEEN on new teaching mindsets Nathan Kahl Fri, 10/25/2024 - 09:45

In This Story

Engineering Unleashed

Engineering Unleashed is a site where KEEN members share knowledge, creating “cards” where they publish projects and ideas. The following cards from George Mason faculty are on the site.

Entrepreneurially Minded Learning in a New Civil Engineering Elective Course: Part I – Boom!, by Girum Urgessa

Campus Navigator Project for freshmen students, by Humaira Akhtari

��AV’s College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) is making the most of its membership in KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network), a nationwide network of 66 institutions, which it joined in December 2023.

Girum Urgessa, professor of civil engineering in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, and Director of Student Leadership and Success, is the school’s KEEN lead. His first step as a KEEN evangelist was meeting with all nine departments. “We discussed the benefits for our faculty, our student body, and our college,” he said.

Urgessa (right) at an Engineering Unleashed faculty development workshop. Photo provided.

KEEN’s goal is “instilling the entrepreneurial mindset in 100 percent of undergraduate engineering and computing students,” specifically focusing on a learning framework called the ‘3 C’s’: curiosity, connections, and creating value. When instilling KEEN elements into instruction, faculty don’t need to develop new courses but rather rethink their teaching approach.

“Faculty can be intentional about fostering curiosity, making connections, and getting students to integrate information from different sources in meaningful ways,” said Urgessa. “And whether through a classroom exercise or a co-curricular activity, we need engineering and computing students to think about creating personal or societal value in a larger context.”

Several CEC faculty attended three of KEEN’s 2024 summer workshops, fully paid for by the Kern Family Foundation, which launched KEEN. Urgessa calls these workshops a “gold standard,” helping faculty enhance teaching skills and elevate activities beyond the classroom, such as undergraduate research and student club engagement.

The KEEN Entrepreneurially Minded Learning Framework. Photo courtesy KEEN.

“The most common feedback I get from faculty is, ‘How can I incorporate and measure mindset learning?’” said Urgessa. “A great thing about KEEN is that there are already approved learning outcomes for this. One of my favorite outcomes is to ‘persist through and learn from failure.’ So when teaching, I can incorporate a problem where students fail several times before arriving at a final solution or design, but I intentionally allow time for them to learn from these repeated failures and reflect.”

To ensure full KEEN integration, CEC established the inaugural Mason KEEN Faculty Learning Community, a group of eight faculty from several departments who have attended KEEN workshops or conferences and meet monthly to share classroom implementation experiences.

By joining KEEN, CEC faculty are supporting students who are prepared to enter the workforce and are ready to make positive contributions in a rapidly changing world.

Topics

Engineering Education

Learning Communities

entrepreneurship

Students

New College of Engineering and Computing professor Missy Cummings seeks to address challenges in artificial intelligence

Tama Moni — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 19:27:32 +0000

New College of Engineering and Computing professor Missy Cummings seeks to address challenges in artificial intelligence Tama Moni Tue, 01/03/2023 - 14:27

As one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots and an engineer, Mary “Missy” Cummings is accustomed to breaking barriers and solving problems. So, when the opportunity to develop a new interdisciplinary program in artificial intelligence (AI) at ��AV’s College of Engineering and Computing emerged, she didn’t hesitate.

Cummings wants to increase the public and workforce's understanding of AI and its limits.

Missy Cummings, Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

For example, self-driving cars have proven to be much more difficult to launch safely than originally believed. Before coming to Mason, Cummings served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. She said that experience sparked her interest in a new program in the design and deployment of AI.

“I believe we have a national security crisis across the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense, and many other government agencies,” Cummings said. “We have a genuine technical illiteracy problem. It's not that people can't understand AI. It's that people are just not being educated in how AI is constructed or in its limitations.”

Cummings encountered tech illiteracy problems earlier in her career while serving on the Defense Innovation Board.

“I saw the problem then, and now that I've been in the Department of Transportation, it's doubly reinforced my concern about people's limited understanding of AI,” she said.

Cummings wants industry and government employees to know how to ask the right questions about performance weaknesses and understand where to invest tax dollars.

She said she’s concerned the U.S. doesn’t have an effective workforce when it comes to understanding, managing, acquiring, evaluating, and testing AI. She wants people to learn about the right way for humans and AI to work together as well as to learn what is truly attainable and what is merely hype.

“I think traditional academia has a hard time accepting new areas, like a degree program in the design and deployment of AI. Older schools with more ingrained traditions struggle to embrace newer thinking,” she said. “I don't think Mason is like that. Dean Ken Ball and others at the College of Engineering and Computing as well as Mason’s president Gregory Washington have embraced these ideas.”

“Missy’s knowledge and experience surrounding AI are going to be a phenomenal asset to Mason,” Ball said. “Her ability to make connections between computer science, electrical, and mechanical engineering fields and leverage the strengths of each to improve our understanding of AI will be a game changer. We are thrilled she has decided to work with us.”

Cummings is proposing a new degree program in AI that will target engineering students as well as those in policy, law, and public health. “To navigate the world of AI students also need softer skills in policy, and maybe even ethics,” Cummings said.

"I find that Mason is far more flexible and more open to new ideas than older more entrenched schools. At Mason, people are willing to come together from the different colleges and schools to solve real complex sociotechnical problems," she said. "There's not one societal problem we have today that belongs to a sole discipline."

Her faculty appointment spans three departments—Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. She will also be the First American Bank Endowed Chair and Director of the Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Translational AI. Cummings' scholarly work will include opportunities to work with Fuse at Mason Square faculty and partners. Fuse will launch in 2024.