We live in a world where the half-life of newly developed technology is shrinking with each passing year. As a result, in the twenty-first century an engineer must be capable of working in a rapidly changing, multidisciplinary environment. Now more than ever it is important for engineering schools to prepare students for these challenges and train engineers who can hit the ground running and be able to make immediate contributions in industry. The ways in which educational human factors complements engineering education’s research and mission will be discussed early in the seminar. Engineering education and human factors are both multidisciplinary in nature. Human factors research often simultaneously involves elements of engineering, psychology, biomechanics, physiology, as well as learning and training. Human factors can be used in engineering education research to better understand how users at all levels of education interact with educational systems. An example of research into the development of a flexible intelligent tutoring system (ITS) will be discussed. The ITS model contains a domain reasoner which diagnoses a student’s knowledge, selects appropriate problems relative to skill, assesses the student’s progress and then graduates the student to the next module. A spatial reasoning tutor was designed using this ITS model for training mechanical engineering undergraduates to mentally visualize and rotate 3-D models more effectively. Evaluation results showed the tutor to be very effective at improving visualization skills and graduated students to the next module in such a way that was consistent with the student’s ability. The ITS model that was developed is extremely flexible and can be deployed in multiple ways, thus allowing students to learn basic skills at their own pace and freeing up course time for more advanced topics and practice. A model of this type would also be very valuable in distance learning applications.

Matthew Romoser completed his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2008. Dr. Romoser also holds a BSEE and MSIE from Purdue University and worked for three years as a design and application engineer at General Electric in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His research focus is in the area of human factors engineering specializing in education and training. His training research has spanned multiple domains including transportation, health care, homeland security as well as distance learning and undergraduate education.