Teaching Documents by Benjamin Laugelli
UVA Lifetime Learning Blog, 2023
For a group of engineering undergraduates, January brings a unique academic experience during the... more For a group of engineering undergraduates, January brings a unique academic experience during the University's winter semester in a class called "The LEGO® Course: Engineering Design and Values." The course examines the history, brand identity, and design philosophy of the LEGO Group to teach students about the role social and ethical perspectives play in engineering design. Drawing inspiration from the company's philosophy of "learning through play," the course pairs a topical seminar discussion in the morning with a hands-on studio class in the afternoon in which students gain experience in aspects of design by developing their own LEGO concept models.
UVA Today, 2022
https://news.virginia.edu/content/toy-story-how-uva-students-learn-engineering-valuesthrough-lego... more https://news.virginia.edu/content/toy-story-how-uva-students-learn-engineering-valuesthrough-lego-bricks With a collection of toys on display, Ben Laugelli, an assistant professor in the UVA Department of Engineering and Society, leads discussion during "The Lego Course." (Photos by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications) Ben Laugelli has three college degrees, including a doctorate from the University of Virginia in religious studies. He's been the winner of a dissertation-writing grant and has had work presented at a variety of national symposiums. Yes, that Ben Laugelli, the one standing in front of a Thornton Hall classroom with a Minions Lego toy in his hands. The final day of a January term course called "The Lego Course: Engineering Design and Values" began with some show-and-tell from the instructor. Laugelli, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, lined a table adjacent to his desk with adult creations from a childhood pastime.
Papers by Benjamin Laugelli
ASEE 2023 Annual Conference Proceedings, 2023
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is widely regarded as a foundational work of early science fict... more Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is widely regarded as a foundational work of early science fiction that cautions against misguided and unethical science and engineering. As such, the novel should be poised to help engineering undergraduates cultivate moral imagination and a commitment to socially responsible techno-science. However, despite recent critical editions of the novel that highlight its relevance for scientists and engineers, some instructors have faced difficulties successfully integrating the novel into an undergraduate engineering curriculum, and students have struggled to appreciate its value to their ethical formation as engineering professionals. Nevertheless, the novel's potential to address ethical aspects of engineering practice calls for further attempts at integrating it into engineering education. In particular, the archetypal figure of Victor Frankenstein offers students a model of a negative "possible self" that cautions against rogue engineering practices. The paper analyzes themes from Shelley's novel as they were used in courses in science, technology, and society (STS) to foster ethical reflection on the perils of practicing irresponsible, presumptuous, unaccountable, and biased techno-science.
American Society for Engineering Education - Southeast Section, 2021
Undergraduate engineering programs often emphasize technological innovation, leadership, and prof... more Undergraduate engineering programs often emphasize technological innovation, leadership, and professional ethics. It is less clear, though, how to cultivate the kind of ethical formation that enables students to integrate technical proficiency with ethical reasoning in the technological design process. To that end, the paper describes how ethical frameworks of sustainability, justice, and care were integrated into a first-year engineering course in Science, Technology, and Society. Course material and assignments, as well as select student written reflections, illustrate how the course challenged students to apply both technical and ethical training to generate innovative designs that facilitate socially responsible, just, and sustainable practices.
2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2022
For over twenty years college instructors have successfully integrated LEGO® products into underg... more For over twenty years college instructors have successfully integrated LEGO® products into undergraduate engineering classrooms to facilitate active learning experiences in engineering design. These experiences allow students to develop core technical proficiencies primarily related to robotics and computer programming. Despite the successful adoption of LEGO Mindstorms to teach valuable technical skills in robotics, LEGO products and practices have not been widely included in non-technical engineering classroom settings to facilitate students’ understanding of social and ethical aspects of engineering design. If LEGO products and practices could be integrated into a course in science, technology, and society (STS), as they have been into technical robotics courses, this might help students appreciate the relevance of STS and ethical concepts to engineering design challenges. With this in mind, I developed a course in STS called The LEGO Course: Engineering Design and Values. The course pairs a seminar discussion with a studio design experience to integrate the teaching of STS and ethical perspectives with authentic engineering design challenges oriented around the LEGO Group’s products, practices, and core values. Student reflections and evaluations suggest that the course effectively leverages the LEGO Group’s philosophy of “learning through play” to convey the value that social and ethical perspectives bring to engineering design.
2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings
2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings
She applies her skills as a social psychologist to gather data from executives about stellar pres... more She applies her skills as a social psychologist to gather data from executives about stellar presentations and other oral communication skills and she conducts research on communication, to improve instruction for both undergraduates and PhD students. Dr. Norback has developed and provided instruction for students in industrial and biomedical engineering and has advised on oral communication instruction at other universities. Since she founded the Presentation Coaching Program in 2003, the coaching has had over 41,000 student visits. As of winter 2015, she shared her instructional materials, including a scoring system evaluated for reliability, with over 400 schools from the U.S., Australia, Germany, and South Korea. Dr. Norback has studied communication and other basic skills in the workplace and developed curriculum over the past 30 years-first at Educational Testing Service; then as part of the Center for Skills Enhancement, Inc., which she founded, with clients including the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Skill Standards Board, and universities. Since arriving at Georgia Tech in 2000 her work has focused on oral communication for engineering students and engineers. Dr. Norback has published over 20 articles in the past decade alone, in the ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, INFORMS Transactions on Education, and the International Journal of Engineering Education, and others. She authored the book Oral Communication Excellence for Engineers and Scientists, published in summer 2013. Over the past 15 years Dr. Norback has given over 40 conference presentations and workshops at nationwide conferences such as ASEE, where she has served as chair of the Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division. She has been an officer for the Education Forum of INFORMS and has served as Associate Chair for the National Capstone Design Conference. Dr. Norback has a Bachelors' degree from Cornell University and a Masters and PhD from Princeton University. Her current research interests include 1) clarifying the effectiveness of video distribution and the use of exit tickets in oral communication instruction for engineers, 2) identifying the mental models engineering students use when creating graphical representations, and 3) learning the trends and themes represented in the communication-related papers across various divisions of ASEE. As part of this effort, Norback is working with Kay Neeley of U of VA to start an ASEE Communication across Divisions Community, now numbering 80 people.
What does the pro`ile of this Israel look like? Who belongs and on what terms? When, where, and b... more What does the pro`ile of this Israel look like? Who belongs and on what terms? When, where, and by what means does the nation's restoration occur? By addressing these questions I hope to underscore how reading allusion to Deut 30.1-10 in the four later narratives illumines various possible and indeed competing literary models for re`iguring Israel's identity in the wake of foreign conquest and under the shadow of an exile literarily imagined as unresolved and ongoing. To undertake this study I develop an intertextual and reader-oriented approach to biblical allusion. This approach allows for exploring the interpretive possibilities reading allusion offers irrespective of authorial intention. Rather than take up questions such as, "is there suf`icient evidence to indicate that an author intended to signal an allusion to Deut 30.1-10" or, "how did the author intend for his/her original readers to construe the text's meaning in light of the allusion," my study considers questions such as, "what elements in the text, whether intentional or accidental, allow for reading an allusion to Deut 30.1-10" and, "how does the allusion, once activated, affect the perception of meaning in the alluding text." My interests, then, are less with demonstrating that an allusion is actually and intentionally present in the text or that an original audience would have interpreted an allusion in a particular way and more with claim to continuity with pre-exilic Israel and concur with Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, "From Exile and Restoration to Exile and Reconstruction," in Exile and Restoration Revisited: Essays on the
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Teaching Documents by Benjamin Laugelli
Papers by Benjamin Laugelli