WPI at ASEE 2025

This paper presents a learning module, “Water and M&M,” designed to introduce economics to engineering students entertainingly. Student teams review key principles of economics, identify real-life examples and value-creation opportunities, and consider the role of governments in markets. By sharing teaching plans, tips for instructors, and lessons learned, the paper contributes to promoting economic literacy in engineering education.

We propose a new scalable framework, Graduate Translational Engineering Research, that gives PhD students the opportunity to train deeply in the process of value creation by incorporating an interdisciplinary PhD thesis committee and qualitative end-user study methods in the formulation of their PhD research proposal. The proposed framework involves PhD students conducting end- user studies early in their program to gain insights into the needs and challenges associated with the knowledge or technology they are developing. The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of assessing real end-user needs on the development of the engineering PhD research proposal through a case study.

This paper documents the findings of a year-long self-study involving an interdisciplinary group of 5 faculty members and the director of the Human Subjects Research program at an engineering school in New England. The self-study asked: what are the primary challenges for leveraging the IRB process for intentional and reflective ethics learning in multidisciplinary engineering settings?

With the National Science Foundation’s emphasis on convergence research as one of the ten big ideas, more researchers explicitly acknowledge the value of convergence research. Yet, many also report that they have difficulty in creating educational programs that help new generations of researchers learn convergence research. Focusing on ethnographic interviews with an interdisciplinary cohort of engineering graduate students at a mid-size polytechnic university, this paper shows that one major challenge is the lack of a clear transdisciplinary methodology in engineering.  

A large fraction of recent graduates from chemical engineering programs are seeing increased employment opportunities in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. The Chemical Engineering program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) offers a biological concentration for students who choose to focus their studies on biological processes. This work-in-progress presents the curriculum for a course--part of the Unit Operations sequence at WPI--that represents the major laboratory component of the chemical engineering curriculum for this new track.

As a student moves through their computer science courses, it can be easy to focus on whether each program performs its desired function, without thinking about their work's overall quality (documentation, style, and functionality). Specifications grading is one method that attempts to solve this problem by requiring students to meet a set of requirements for each assignment that focuses on the overall quality of the work, which can include programming style, functionality, and documentation. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of specifications grading to motivate students to write high-quality programs and present preliminary results using this grading system in Fall 2024 in a class with 77 students.

The Connecting Mentor Partners for Academic Success of Undergraduates in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CoMPASS) scholarship program at WPI is ending in 2025, and since 2020 has provided an assets-based framework of wrap-around support for 20 high-achieving, low-income, first-generation students from the Worcester Public Schools. The cohort retention and graduation rates surpass WPI’s average, and students feel that a sense of belonging, safety, support, and care has been created by the support team, who meet bi-weekly to report one-on-one student interactions, discuss paths forward, and plan just-in-time development programming.

Session information coming soon.

The global semiconductor industry is facing a critical worker shortage that threatens to derail the revenue trajectory of this internationally important industry, one that is projected to generate over a trillion USD by 2030 [1]. To address this, companies are investigating and investing in workforce development. Heidelberg Instruments Nano aims to contribute to this effort by utilizing the NanoFrazor tool in nanofabrication related education modules. By leveraging nanofabrication and imaging capabilities associated with thermal scanning probe lithography (t-SPL), students can create and see nanostructures in real-time and within an hour of training. In collaboration with Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Heidelberg Instruments Nano has developed teaching materials for both classroom and laboratory settings.