Program encourages retention
By: Abid Mujtaba
Issue date: 11/8/07 Section: News
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Brandon Blamer - nuclear, Jacob Hughes - civil, Kyle Benson - aerospace, Rumki Mannan - biomedical and Zhassymbek Shynggys - petroleum are members of Team 9. They have a group on Facebook and, no, they are not an indoor soccer team. They are freshmen engineering students who are part of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics Talent Extension Program, STEP.
STEP is an endeavor initiated in 2004 by the College of Engineering in collaboration with the departments of mathematics and physics to increase the retention rates of freshmen engineering students after the first year.
The program is implemented by Texas A&M in collaboration with the Texas Engineering Experiment Station with a funding of $2 million to date from the National Science Foundation.
A freshman engineering student will enroll in ENGR 111, MATH 151 and PHYS 218 simultaneously in their first semester. They will be assigned to a team with whom they will take all three courses.
"The focus for the college of engineering, primarily, is to get students to think about engineering tasks when they walk in to an engineering class and to see how mathematics and physics are used in carrying out these tasks," said Arun Srinivasa, director of STEP and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
STEP attempts to emphasize how engineering, mathematics and physics have a large body of common knowledge to which they each bring a different perspective.
"The math class starts off with vectors, so we tend to do a project in week three [in ELEN 111] that uses vectors, while simultaneously the students are studying kinematics in PHYS 218 which uses vectors immediately," he said. "You can see how the three things are aligned…we want to make sure that the connections are evident."
"We want to give the students a task-oriented approach towards engineering [right from their freshman courses]," said Srinivasa. "We need to get the students to build something."
STEP is an endeavor initiated in 2004 by the College of Engineering in collaboration with the departments of mathematics and physics to increase the retention rates of freshmen engineering students after the first year.
The program is implemented by Texas A&M in collaboration with the Texas Engineering Experiment Station with a funding of $2 million to date from the National Science Foundation.
A freshman engineering student will enroll in ENGR 111, MATH 151 and PHYS 218 simultaneously in their first semester. They will be assigned to a team with whom they will take all three courses.
"The focus for the college of engineering, primarily, is to get students to think about engineering tasks when they walk in to an engineering class and to see how mathematics and physics are used in carrying out these tasks," said Arun Srinivasa, director of STEP and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
STEP attempts to emphasize how engineering, mathematics and physics have a large body of common knowledge to which they each bring a different perspective.
"The math class starts off with vectors, so we tend to do a project in week three [in ELEN 111] that uses vectors, while simultaneously the students are studying kinematics in PHYS 218 which uses vectors immediately," he said. "You can see how the three things are aligned…we want to make sure that the connections are evident."
"We want to give the students a task-oriented approach towards engineering [right from their freshman courses]," said Srinivasa. "We need to get the students to build something."
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