Summer Engineering Experience (SEE) Program - A Program to Prepare Freshmen Students for Engineering Studies

This paper details the development process of the Summer Engineering Experience (SEE) program implemented at Vaughn College in order to prepare first-year students for engineering programs. Unlike the traditional pre-engineering programs held in other universities or colleges, which are devoted mainly to mathematics or physics courses, the objective of the Vaughn program is to enhance students’ hands-on, computational, programming, communication, and problem solving skills. The five-week SEE program was offered in the summer 2016, Monday through Thursday, from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. Lectures and hands-on classes throughout the program covered topics such as engineering computation using MATLAB and C++, robotics, bridge truss design & analysis, technical writing and presentation. The Friday session of the SEE program was designated for technical seminars and workshops designed to enhance students’ learning outcomes related to critical thinking, problem solving, and life-long learning. Guest speakers from the industry were invited to deliver lectures and host workshops current with today’s technology. Given the rapid pace of technological change, the Friday seminar series and workshops were designed to foster in Vaughn’s engineering students a mind-set receptive to changes in technology in order to prepare them for their future professional careers. During the last two weeks of the program, students were arranged into two to three person groups to work with a SEE faculty mentor and develop a project with real-world engineering application. These projects were presented on the final day of the SEE program, and faculty evaluated the student performances according to specific learning outcomes. A rubric survey was also distributed to students in order to assess the program’s effectiveness. The implementation and assessment process of Vaughn’s SEE program based on both faculty and students’ survey results will be discussed in the ASEE Annual Conference.