ContextA reputable and reliable outlet for publication is an important component of building a research ecosystem.Currently, the Engineering Education Research community in India is at a nascent stage, and lacks a world-renowned outlet for publication.The Journal of Engineering Education Transformations (JEET), was established in 1985 to serve as an outlet for sharing narratives of educational transformations at engineering institutions in western India.For the past six years, the journal has itself undergone a transformation, from publishing a small set of case studies, to publishing peer-reviewed articles that range from engineering education research, to practice and even policy.As a result of this transformation, the number of submissions to the journal have skyrocketed over the last few years indicating the EER community's faith in the journal's quality and practices.This article aims to describe JEET's transformation and provides details of its inner workings including training programs such as a mentored reviewer program.The journal and the EER ecosystem in India, have a long way to go, and a discussion on JEET is necessary to engage the EER community. Purpose or GoalThe goal behind submitting this article is to have a frank and open conversation on how operating procedures could be improved at the journal, how the EER community in India can benefit from adopting the journal and enabling its success, and to solicit innovative ideas on how the journal can best serve the needs of a growing ecosystem of engineering education researchers and scholarly teachers in India.A secondary goal is to involve the global EER community at large to help JEET in having an impact and presence beyond India. MethodsThe paper takes a simple narrative approach, with the journal editors presenting the history and growth of the journal, supported by statistics on number of submissions, time to review, time to publish etc. OutcomesThe paper will showcase the journey of the journal from being a repository for the occasional case study to a Scopus-indexed journal that accepts papers on the scholarship of teaching and learning. ConclusionJEET has established strong practices for peer review and quality control.It seeks more engagement from budding engineering education researchers in India for participating in peer-reviews.It will also benefit from international engagement.Having become a Scopusindexed journal, JEET serves to elevate the EER community in India and needs participation from all stakeholders to take it to the next level.

Abstract: In this article, the authors explore and understand what constitutes engineering thinking and whether secondary and higher secondary school curricula in India empower students to make an informed decision regarding engineering as a career choice. To analyse the elements of engineering thinking, the principles of K12 level engineering by t he Na t io nal Aca demy of E nginee ri ng a nd Engineering Habits of Mind (EHoM) by the Royal Academy of Engineering are referred to. The syllabi of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and four Indian states (Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka) are studied, which reveal that CBSE includes only one element of EHoM (creative problem-solving) in higher secondary grade curriculum. The syllabi of four Indian states revealed that the principles identified by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) are missing in both grades. As an exception, the syllabus of Maharashtra has a creative problem-solving element in class-12 of higher secondary grades. The authors believe that introducing engineering thinking in schools will empower students to choose engineering as a career. Keywords: Engineering habits of mind, Engineering thinking, Indian school curriculum, STEM, secondary and higher secondary school

The Journal of Engineering Education Transformations (JEET) is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal committed to the advancement of theory, research and practice in engineering education.The journal is international in its scope, inviting scholars and experts from across the globe to share their theoretical insights, research findings, and innovative practices to enhance and transform engineering education.In addition to publishing high-quality articles, the JEET editorial team is committed to developing authors as researchers through their review process.JEET is growing at a consistent rate and is actively seeking ways to increase its pool of reviewers, enhance the quality of reviews and build capacity amongst researchers and practitioners.To support this goal, in 2020, JEET started a mentored reviewer program modeled after a similar program that was run by the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). PURPOSEThe broader purpose of this study is to build capacity in engineering education research in India through a mentored reviewer program.The purpose of this paper is to outline the design of the mentored reviewer program, discuss anecdotal findings from the first round of delivery and describe the plans for a research study that will be employed to gather data from an upcoming second round. APPROACHObservations from the first round of the program were reviewed by the authors to find recurring themes.In addition, the authors, who were also the organizers of the program, reflect on their own experience. OUTCOMESAnecdotal evidence from the first offering of this mentored reviewer program suggests that besides providing training for becoming better reviewers, the program has successfully built a broader research community.Several participants expressed how the program has helped them to grow, not only as reviewers but also as authors and researchers. CONCLUSIONSThis paper provides a comprehensive design of a mentored reviewer program to develop engineering education researchers.The paper also provides a critical evaluation of the first round of program delivery, highlighting opportunities for further refinement.The paper concludes with recommendations for a research study that will be carried out on the second round of the program to explore the experiences of mentees and mentors in relation to the community of practice framework.Furthermore, the study starts to challenge some of the existing paradigms in traditional review process, suggesting a more collaborative approach.

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper presents the design, environment, and preliminary results of implementing a virtualized environment for an upper-division course offering in Software Engineering. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm rapidly gaining adoption in everyday consumer computing. Several recent publications and educational platforms recognize the potential for IoT to serve as this rich platform for computing education. However, most of these contributions focus on early undergraduate courses in small hands-on settings using general purpose hobbyist kits based on Arduinos or Raspberry PIs. This paper presents a new and novel IoT educational platform based on virtualization technology. The platform was designed specifically for scalable and complex IoT systems-oriented challenges appropriate for upper-division undergraduate study. This platform was utilized in an online setting at Arizona State University for the first time in Fall 2019. This paper presents insights from this experience, based on student in-class surveys, formal course evaluations, and the instructor’s perspective, along with a roadmap for maturing the platform.

Impact of PLP on Student Learning: Initial Results The Progressive Learning Platform (PLP) is a System on a Chip design with accompanyingtools reflecting a contemporary CPU architecture. All hardware components of PLP are written inVerilog HDL, are open-source, and are freely available. To support the hardware components, aunified assembler, cycle accurate emulator, and board interface software package is included. Thesoftware is written in Java, works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, is open-source, and is freelyavailable. The PLP hardware and software components are licensed under the General PublicLicense version 3 to encourage open access and contribution. All parts of the system are publiclyhosted and a public mailing list is used to serve as a communication channel between users anddevelopers of the system. This paper reports on the pilot study that examines the impact of PLP on student learningin an introductory microprocessors class. Both quantitative and qualitative data showed thatstudents’ knowledge of microprocessors observably increased with the use of the ProgressiveLearning Platform as a tool for learning. Student-based qualitative data was collected throughwritten reflections, student focus groups, and video transcripts. Data included analyzing studentuse of language over time, focus group reports and content matter pre- and post quiz results. Linguistic analysis suggests change from dependence to independence in troubleshootingand problem-solving, comfort with PLP as demonstrated through progressively more effectiveuse of the term, and shift of responsibility of learning from instructors to student teamenvironments. Analysis of the data from student focus groups shows dramatic increase in studentreported engagement and motivation within the PLP classroom environment. Students attributedthis primarily to teaching style and methods and perceived authenticity of task and environmentcreated by the use of PLP. Pre- and post quiz results show significant gains in students’knowledge of computing fundamentals.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper reflects on a pilot experiment aimed to fill a perceived need for training faculty and to sustain systematic and rigorous research in the area of engineering education in India. The pilot was carried out in the form of a year-long online course with thirteen webinars, taught by two faculty members, one from the United States and one from Australia. One of the faculty is a computer engineer who has published research in engineering education outlets in the past decade, and the other faculty member is a psychologist who has extensive experience in conducting human subjects research. The participants in the course are faculty teaching in engineering institutions in India. Some have a PhD while others have a master’s degree in an engineering discipline. The course was designed to cater to an audience that had no prior experience with human subject research and no prior experience in action research. The content covered are the significant components of a research framework, which includes problem definition, research design, methods of data collection and analyses, ethical issues in research and report writing. The long-term goal for this course is to spread awareness of best practices and to increase the overall quality of papers in this area. A survey was administered to the 40 participants in the course, and information was obtained that is deemed helpful to future offerings of the course. This paper summarizes the findings and aims to present them to an international audience with the intent of soliciting inputs from the audience and engage in a discussion that might inform future efforts in this direction in other countries where engineering education might be a nascent discipline.

Arizona State Universityʼs bachelor of science in software engineering is the first Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accredited software engineering program offered in an online modality. ASUʼs online software engineering program has experienced rapid growth, to over 1000 students in a 5-year span. The programʼs design is the same as the on-campus offering, featuring a unique curriculum centered on a professional spine comprised of team-oriented project-based learning courses. The scale of the program and its growth, combined with a hands-on applied learning approach, creates challenges that have mandated innovative and adaptable processes to be successful. Specifically, the faculty have led a three-year effort on pedagogical innovations and internal quality process improvements to address unique aspects of online software engineering education delivery. In this paper we will present the evolution of the online program and the innovations required to support scale and growth while producing industry-ready software engineers. These innovations have resulted in an upward trend in student satisfaction, reversing a prior three-year downward trend from the inception of the online program.

Embedded systems, smart electronics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are topics that are rapidly evolving, not just in research and development laboratories, but in the real world of industrial and consumer products. Because of the fast pace of technological progress, the evolution of standards, and the non-stop growth in the application space, it is impossible to teach our students everything that they need to master. How then, can we best prepare students with a diverse set of needs and abilities to be productive when they join the workforce in this technical area of such high projected need? This paper describes a third-year undergraduate course aimed at teaching students how to design embedded systems. The course draws upon two pedagogical concepts: (1) differentiated instruction, where curriculum is designed to help students with a variety of different skill levels and interests to succeed and grow beyond their current level of mastery, and (2) project-based learning, where curriculum relies heavily on hands-on projects such that students learn theory through application in real-world settings. The course walks students through idea generation, requirements specification, design, manufacturing, and testing, ending with a public demonstration of their product. Outcomes for the course are defined not just for technical competence, but also for other areas such as design, critical thinking, teamwork, professionalism and communication. This paper provides details and the rationale behind the choices made by the instructors and describes a study in progress on the effectiveness of a differentiated instruction project-based learning approach to teaching embedded systems.

This paper gives examples of security injections in computer engineering courses, including courses on hardware design. More broadly, the paper aims to show how knowledge of hardware and software implementations relate to security exploits is important for students who design computer hardware, and how knowledge of the hardware and architectural features is important for those who focus on computer security. The paper provides examples to illustrate the impact of the knowledge of underlying architectural optimizations and hardware limitations on security features and exploits. Examples of educational tools and methods for integrating security education in context in the computer engineering curriculum are also described.

The primary function of multimedia systems is to seamlessly transform and display content to users while maintaining the perception of acceptable quality. For images and videos, perceptual quality assessment algorithms play an important role in determining what is acceptable quality and what is unacceptable from a human visual perspective. As modern image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms gain widespread adoption, it is important to achieve a balance between their computational efficiency and their quality prediction accuracy. One way to improve computational performance to meet real-time constraints is to use simplistic models of visual perception, but such an approach has a serious drawback in terms of poor-quality predictions and limited robustness to changing distortions and viewing conditions. In this paper, we investigate the advantages and potential bottlenecks of implementing a best-in-class IQA algorithm, Most Apparent Distortion, on graphics processing units (GPUs). Our results suggest that an understanding of the GPU and CPU architectures, combined with detailed knowledge of the IQA algorithm, can lead to non-trivial speedups without compromising prediction accuracy. A single-GPU and a multi-GPU implementation showed a 24× and a 33× speedup, respectively, over the baseline CPU implementation. A bottleneck analysis revealed the kernels with the highest runtimes, and a microarchitectural analysis illustrated the underlying reasons for the high runtimes of these kernels. Programs written with optimizations such as blocking that map well to CPU memory hierarchies do not map well to the GPU’s memory hierarchy. While compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is convenient to use and is powerful in facilitating general purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming, knowledge of how a program interacts with the underlying hardware is essential for understanding performance bottlenecks and resolving them.

This paper presents the idea and a proposed implementation of a network of Gurukuls or Centers of Excellence for engineering education in India. Facilitated by Indo Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) in partnership with institutions in India, the IUCEE Gurukuls for Learning and Outcomes Based Education (iGLOBE) program addresses a vital need for institutions to develop self-reliance towards achieving excellence in engineering education. The primary role of the Gurukul in an institution is to provide an ecosystem for faculty development in a manner that will directly contribute to enhance students' learning experience. The mission of the Gurukul is to guide and mentor its faculty in improving their teaching and learning methods, in implementing outcomes based education and in conducting engineering education research. There is a large body of literature available on effective teaching and learning through engineering education conference proceedings and journals, and in wider outlets.However, one of the key observations over the last two decades is that adoption of research based instructional techniques into engineering classrooms is extremely low. We believe that the main reason for such non-adoption is that potential adopters are unable to contextualize the pedagogical research. The paper lays out a vision for a network of discipline-based education researchers to contextualize and coordinate efforts between the Gurukuls and participants/practitioners. The paper considers lessons learned and best practices from efforts in the United States and lays out a blueprint for catalyzing high quality instruction in engineering colleges in India.

A relatively recent thrust in IQA research has focused on estimating the quality of a distorted image without access to the original (reference) image. Algorithms for this so-called noreference IQA (NR IQA) have made great strides over the last several years, with some NR algorithms rivaling full-reference algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy. However, there still remains a large gap in terms of runtime performance; NR algorithms remain significantly slower than FR algorithms, owing largely to their reliance on natural-scene statistics and other ensemble-based computations. To address this issue, this paper presents a GPGPU implementation, using NVidia's CUDA platform, of the popular Blind Image Integrity Notator using DCT Statistics (BLIINDS-II) algorithm [8], a state of the art NR-IQA algorithm. We copied the image over to the GPU and performed the DCT and the statistical modeling using the GPU. These operations, for each 5x5 pixel window, are executed in parallel. We evaluated the implementation by using NVidia Visual Profiler, and we compared the implementation to a previously optimized CPU C++ implementation. By employing suitable optimizations on code, we were able to reduce the runtime for each 512x512 image from approximately 270 ms down to approximately 9 ms, which includes the time for all data transfers across PCIe bus. We discuss our unique implementation of BLIINDS-II designed specifically for use on the GPU, the insights gained from the runtime analyses, and how the GPGPU techniques developed here can be adapted for use in other NR IQA algorithms.

Online education comes in various flavors - skills centered short-duration training, massively open online courses (MOOCs), and more recently, the offering of full online degree programs. In the past 4 years at Arizona State University, the faculty created an online software engineering degree program equivalent to an existing on-campus program, and produced its first graduates in Spring 2017. The challenges in creating this program were significant, but surprisingly the main challenges were not the ones that the faculty anticipated at the outset of the program's development. This paper shares the lessons learned from the development of the online degree program, with an emphasis on the gap between faculty expectations and fears versus the actual issues that needed to be addressed.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of including questions within instructional multimedia content to improve student performance on a related programming assignment. An experiment was conducted where one set of students was provided with an instructional video without any embedded questions and another set of students was provided the same video with embedded questions. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the technique of embedding questions showed promise in improving student performance on a programming assignment.

The role of error messages in the context of teaching programming, specifically assembly language programming to students who have limited prior programming experience was investigated. Assemblers and compilers provide feedback to a programmer in the form of error messages, and these error messages influence the programmer's mental model of computing. The current study investigated how an error message affects students' approach to understanding the error and fixing the error. Three error message types were developed - Default, Link and Example, to better understand the effects of error messages. The Default type provides an assembler-centric single line error message, the Link type provides a program-centric detailed error description with a hyperlink for more information, and the Example type provides a program-centric detailed error description with a relevant example. A think aloud programming exercise was conducted to capture the student programmer's knowledge model. Different codes were developed to analyze the data collected as part of think aloud exercise. After transcribing, coding, and analyzing the data, it was found that the Link type of error message helped to fix the error in less time and with fewer steps. Among the three types, the Link type of error message also resulted in a higher ratio of correct to incorrect hypotheses made by the participants, and a correspondingly higher ratio of correct to incorrect steps taken by them to fix the error.

This paper presents an initial investigation on the effect of non-pre-exposure to an instruction set architecture (ISA). In particular, a specialized ISA based on the Progressive Learning Platform (PLP) is implemented in the computer architecture course. Prior research has demonstrated the benefits of using PLP in the computer engineering curriculum. However, it is possible that the PLP ISA could hinder learning by requiring extra work for students to master it (extraneous load), if they have not had prior exposure to it. To investigate this, the current study implemented a quasi-experimental design with two groups (students knowledgeable with PLP from a previous course, and new users) and a pretest to determine differences in students' familiarity with the common terms in computer engineering, pre-requisite knowledge for a computer architecture course, and course knowledge. Both sets of students implemented the PLP CPU in behavioral Verilog in the computer architecture course. Results of the evaluations revealed significant learning from pretest to posttest by students in both groups on all measures. Moreover, no group differences were seen, indicating that pre exposure to an ISA (specifically PLP ISA) might not be necessary for successful course implementation. This is promising, considering that many students at 4-year colleges in the USA transfer from other institutions, and may have exposure to different instruction set architectures in their prerequisite courses. The sample size for this study is too small to draw a firm conclusion, but these preliminary findings merit further exploration of this topic.

Peer learning principles have been successfully applied to novice programmers. Pedagogies such as Pair Programming, Peer Testing, Peer review of code or tests, or, more generally Peer Instruction, have repeatedly demonstrated their effectiveness in improving both individual performance and retention rates. This paper proposes to supplement the existing literature by investigating how students interact with one another during collaborative programming tasks. More specifically, we are interested in comparing the learning principles used during student-student interactions with those used during student-instructor or student-teaching assistant dialogs. Students in online and face to face courses, who worked collaboratively on programming assignments, were surveyed to gain an understanding of the frequency with which they engaged in specific activities. These that are representative of the learning principles that have been supported by research to promote learning. Results suggest that some learning principles, may be absent from student-student interactions. We discuss how the success of collaborative programming pedagogies put into question the role of these principles and whether they may contribute to further improve peer-based approaches.

Many industries are increasingly adopting cloud computing. There are several electronic design automation (EDA) industry players, large and small companies, who have explored the idea of providing cloud-based very large-scale integration design tools and services. This paper briefly explores the history of EDA solutions and their growth path thus far, starting with standalone computer aided design (CAD) tools, through specialized EDA workstations, to integrated suites of tools and flows as currently provided by EDA vendors. A representative EDA flow and its steps are described to provide a basis for relating individual EDA tools to appropriate workload categories. Each step in the EDA design flow is then mapped to a cloud computing workload category. This mapping provides a basis for a decision on moving particular EDA design flow steps to a cloud computing environment. This paper also lists some capabilities currently offered by the public and private cloud providers as a basis for looking at the challenges and opportunities for migrating EDA solutions to cloud computing.

This paper investigates group/team development in computer engineering courses at a University in the Central USA from the perspective of organization behavior theory, specifically Tuckman’s model of the stages of group development. The investigation, conducted through linguistic analysis of student reflection essays, and through focus group interviews, also presents STEM education researchers with a method to obtain nuanced information about interpersonal skills issues such as how groups and teams function. A third contribution of the paper is a review of the organizational behavior literature on teams and groups with a concern for its application to modern engineering education.