Developing model-eliciting activities for undergraduate students based on advanced engineering content

Are you interested in creating open-ended, client-driven, realistic engineering tasks for undergraduate students that will introduce them to the world of engineering early in their academic careers? With the support of the National Science Foundation, model-eliciting activities (MEAs) were created and implemented with first-year engineering students at Purdue University. These tasks are open-ended modeling problems that introduce advanced engineering content yet are suitable for undergraduate engineering students. In this paper, we will give a personal account of the research and development of the nano roughness MEA. We will focus on the attainment of the six principles that guide the development of an MEA and the main development challenges: identifying aspects of an advanced engineering topic suitable for undergraduate students, making the task realistic, creating the need for team interaction, making the model reusable in similar situations, and preparing for task implementation in the classroom.