By Cassandra Hendry
A couple of years ago, a few of Leonard MacEachern’s electronics students came to him, hoping to make a 3D-printed prosthetic hand. While the idea itself was great, MacEachern and his students soon realized that to pull this project off, they’d need much more than electronics expertise.
Students skilled in software design and mechanical engineering had to be brought in to help, but that proved to be complicated as well.
“There was no way for us to contact those students easily and tell them about this project,” MacEachern says. “My students had to learn that extra stuff and it wasn’t necessarily something they needed to know.”
From that, an idea was born, one that would eventually earn the electronics professor a 2014 Carleton University Teaching Achievement Award and a prize of $15,000 to bring it to life.
MacEachern found that the fourth-year engineering capstone projects he graded could be improved by integrating other students and their disciplines into them.
“That doesn’t happen often enough and it could happen more often. So what I wanted to do was create a system that allows students to co-ordinate their projects,” he says.
“The system we’re implementing allows students to find each other. A Facebook for fourth-year engineering projects.”
The $15,000 prize money MacEachern won is going to hiring co-op students in summer 2015 to create the infrastructure. Once that’s done, he says he hopes to have the site, run through Carleton, available for the start of the next school year.
To MacEachern, being selected as a winner is still stunning.
“It was the first time I had applied so I didn’t expect to win. I was told that you normally apply twice to win the award. The first time to figure out how to apply, the second time to actually try to get it,” he says.
The interactive style of MacEachern’s project is a natural continuation of his courses, according to him. Many of his students are quiet or are international students, so he tries to get them participating and communicating with each other from the very beginning.
“It’s hard to engage them, so I clown around a lot, and I force them to be engaged. I’m not a lecturer. Within the first three lectures I can say the class has changed,” he says.
Do you have an innovative teaching project that you want to introduce to Carleton? The 2015 Carleton Teaching Achievement Awards are currently open for applications. Learn more here.