Enrollment in North Central State College’s (NCSC) mechanical engineering technology program has grown in recent years with competitions woven into project-based courses and connections to a company uniquely involved in automotive safety tests.
Michael Beebe, assistant professor of engineering at Ohio’s NCSC, credits his MentorLinks Mentor Ken Walz with helping him refine the project-based curriculum for North Central’s mechanical engineering technology associate and bachelor of applied science (BAS) degrees.
Walz, the principal investigator of the Center for Renewable Energy Advanced Technological Education (CREATE) at Madison Area Technical College (Wisconsin), also introduced Beebe to numerous principal investigators of Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Some of those conversations led to Beebe becoming a co-principal investigator for the National Electric Vehicle Consortium. The consortium is an ATE project funded in 2022 that aims to fill the gaps in the education of technicians who work in electric vehicle design.
“That was all MentorLinks,” said Beebe, praising the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) program. “It’s done a lot for us,” he said.
Editor’s note: This article continues a series exploring how various community colleges have leveraged the MentorLinks program. The application for the next MentorLinks cohort opens in April.
AACC offers MentorLinks to help two-year colleges add or enhance technician education programs in STEM fields. MentorLinks provides college teams with mentoring from a technical education expert, $20,000, professional development, technical assistance and travel support. The program receives funding from NSF’s ATE program.
It starts with conversations
Beebe traces his new role among the electric vehicle consortium leaders to Walz introducing him and Daniel Wagner, director and chair of the BAS engineering technology program at North Central State College, to people in face-to-face meetings at the 2019 ATE Principal Investigators’ Conference. The introductions continued during the virtual 2020 and 2021 ATE conferences.
All those conversations “opened doors to see what people were doing,” Beebe said.
Prior to MentorLinks, Beebe and Wagner had added project-based learning to key courses based on their 60-combined years of experience working in industry prior to teaching in college.
“You can’t teach somebody how to design in a lot of ways. But you can have them experience it to get better at it. So that’s why we chose what we did,” he said.
Program improvements
The two instructors put what they learned at the 2019 ATE conference to use by enhancing the competitions that they had already woven into North Central’s curriculum to mimic real-world challenges. Those included requiring students to write reports, make presentations and document how they solved problems.
“It’s like an engineering sport, if you want to call it that. Where they’re designing something; building it. So they’re learning different things about design, working in teams, writing reports, doing presentations. They’re getting an opportunity to do a design, build it, look at the processes and materials. But they have a real reason at the end to do their best, because they want to win,” Beebe said.
North Central’s original MentorLinks goal was to get advice about how to excite high school students’ interest in mechanical engineering technology careers and to recruit them for the college’s programs. By following Walz advice, they now also have a more robust group of industry partners.
“The better advisory group we get, we can fill the needs better,” Beebe said.
Hitting the race track
During 2022, Beebe focused on what he calls “MentorLinks reboot” to restart recruitment efforts in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. During the pandemic, enrollment in the program grew slightly because North Central offered face-to-face courses and students who enrolled at colleges that offered only remote courses transferred in. However, the in-person recruitment events at high schools the team had planned early on with Walz’s advice were not possible in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid-related precautions at the high schools.
Beebe is leveraging North Central students’ positive response to the revamped curriculum and industry advisors’ guidance on how to promote the college’s electric vehicle (EV) curriculum to high school educators in three nearby counties and among the faculty at two-year colleges throughout Ohio. About 40% of the college’s engineering technology students are dual-enrolled high school students who enroll via North Central’s College-NOW program that teens enter as high school juniors.
Smart dummies
Beebe’s big promotional hook is that students will have the opportunity to do their capstone EV and crash test dummy competitions at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course.
“We’ve been pushing every limit we can to see how many people we can get to participate,” he said.
Forty North Central associate and baccalaureate degree students participated in the spring 2022 capstone course competitions – known as the Kehoe Grand Prix – that were held on the Shelby, Ohio, campus parking lot.
In addition to EV time trials, four projects either tested students’ innovations to crash test dummies or used the mannequins to test students’ engineering innovations. Beebe is particularly proud of the team that designed “a measurement brain” for a crash dummy. The brain transducer that one team designed was placed inside a crash test dummy that another group created a trolley to move.
The unusual opportunity to work with dummies is due to Beebe’s connection to Humanetics, an international company that designs and manufactures biofidelic crash-test dummies. Beebe has been the company’s chief technology officer for 10 years and has worked for more than 20 years at the company’s manufacturing facility in Huron, Ohio.
Humanetics provides funding for the crash-test dummy projects and offers internships, which Beebe facilitates.
“I try to get them [students] exposed to lots of different things like that,” he said.
The mini competitions in every mechanical engineering technology course reinforce multiple lessons and require students to develop the teamwork skills all the program’s industry partners say they want graduates to have.
Problem-based learning and competitions “give them better opportunities to fit into a team or lead a team,” Beebe said.
