The 2022 ASEE Gulf-Southwest Section (GSW) Conference was held at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), Prairie View, from Wednesday March 16, to Friday, March 18, 2022. PVAMU now becomes the second Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to host the ASEE GSW Conference in 16 years. This is also the first time since 2020, that the conference was hosted in person.
New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana are the states represented in the Gulf-Southwest Section of ASEE. Members of the Gulf-Southwest Section participate in local professional activities and form regional networks of educators with similar interests and goals. The activities of the section include conducting an annual section conference, conducting workshops and professional development activities for faculty members and administrators, and publishing newsletters.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Engineering Education for Productive People: Preparing Students for the Changing Working Environments”. Around 67 papers were presented in total, ten of which were from Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station. One of the papers presented from TAMU was co-authored with PVAMU, and presented by a PVAMU Undergraduate Student.
Topics in the presentations included: (i) innovations in teaching, (ii) increasing student engagement, (iii) equity, diversity, and inclusion in engineering, (iv) computers in education, (v) preparing the future engineer, (vi) design in engineering education, (vii) accreditation, (viii) entrepreneurship, and (ix) engineering leadership.
The highlights of this year’s conference included the keynote address given by Dr. Karan Watson, Provost Emeritus, Regents Senior Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and IEEI Distinguished Fellow, TAMU.
The title of her talk was “Preparing Our Curricula and Ourselves in order to Prepare Our Graduating Students for the Changes They will see in Their Careers.” Watson spoke about how societal and career changes that our currently graduating students will experience, far exceed the changes most instructors of engineering education have, or will see in their careers.
There is a need to assess how well our curricula and pedagogy have served in the past, and how nimble we are at managing change ourselves, before we propose what is needed for the future. She also said that taking a quick look at the systemic and personal successes and short-comings of our distant and recent past, will point to some of the significant changes we should consider championing to adequately prepare engineers for their future.
Conference participants were also given a tour of the laboratories at the Roy G. Perry College of Engineering at PVAMU. This provided faculty members from TAMU, areas where they could possibly collaborate with PVAMU researchers and students.
TAMU AWARDS
- “Using Neural Networks to Distinguish Children’s Age with Visual Features of Sketches Neural Networks to Distinguish Children’s Age with Visual Features of Sketches”, a paper by Aniket Patel, Tracy Hammond and Seth Polsley won the second place in the Undergraduate Students’’ Papers category.
- “eSMART: A collaborative, competitive challenge to foster engineering education”, a paper by Paul Koola, Jay Porter, and Rahul Subramanian won the third place in the Faculty Papers category.
- Byul Hur won the Outstanding Teacher Award
In addition to these awards, the Expert @ IEEI actively served in the local conference. Dr. Tracy Hammond, Director of the IEEI, said, “The conference was a great opportunity to showcase the academic strengths of both TAMU and PVAMU, share innovative ideas, and expand on existing research collaborations between the two Schools.”
Dr. Randy Brooks, Associate Professor of Practice, Texas A&M Engineering Academy – Brenham, Texas A&M – College of Engineering was elected onto the GSW Executive Committee as Secretary (for a three-year term June 2021-June 2024) and Dr. Paula De Witte, Associate Professor of Practice & Adjunct Professor of Law, Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University School of Law, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station was elected onto the executive committee as the Section Newsletter Editor for the same three-year term.
ASEE GSW 2026 will be held at TAMU, College Station.