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Contribution: This article defines "curricular hackathons" and describes the features, challenges, and opportunities of adopting the hackathon format into engineering curricula. It is based on experience implementing a series of curricular hackathons which provide students with formative design experiences as they address ill-structured and integrative design problems. Background: Design is an essential part of engineering practice. However, undergraduate engineering students are provided few opportunities to develop the skills necessary for solving ill-structured and complex design problems prior to their final year capstone projects. Cornerstone projects and other summative activities are common attempts to introduce students to design, but often carry significant academic weight in the host course. Adapting the hackathon format into curricular elements could provide a useful pedagogy for formative design practice. Research Question: How can the hackathon format be effectively adapted into curricular activities? Methodology: The study uses a multiple case study research design to extract insight from 12 implementations of curricular hackathons in engineering at the University of Waterloo. The twelve cases were analyzed through two methods: 1) a synthesis of eight previous publications and 2) an interview study of 12 instructors involved in their design and implementation. Findings: Adapting the popular hackathon format to a curricular setting requires several adaptations to maximize the impact on students. Curricular hackathons: are a short, high intensity social experience; that guide students through the design-build-test cycle of a design problem, include opportunities for reflection; and achieve some level of integration and/or embedding in a program's curriculum.

Contribution: A first-year programming course was redesigned with a large, open-ended robotics project. The course design aligns with best practices for promoting development of students' self-efficacy in solving ill-structured software design problems. Background: From Jonassen's theory, problem-solving outcomes are dependent on the problem structure, complexity, and representation; and the characteristics of the solver. These characteristics are diverse, including knowledge, familiarity, and psychometric qualities of the solver (e.g., self-efficacy and motivation). Thus, better problem-solving outcomes are dependent on the development of these traits, and on the problem characteristics. Intended Outcomes: Pre-2010, course learning activities and assessments overly focused on syntax. The course was redesigned with a focus on ill-structured problem solving and design in high-fidelity problem domains. Application Design: Complex and ill-structured lecture examples, assignments, and exams were redesigned to reinforce the importance of software design and problem solving. An open-ended cornerstone project using robotics was added as a structured means of providing students practice with solving ill-structured and open-ended problems. The assignment and exam questions, with the course cornerstone project, achieve instructional alignment in the course. Findings: The results show that students' self-efficacy improved from start to end of term. The course design achieves several objectives: 1) students learned the requisite programming skills; 2) students developed their self-efficacy in programming and design; and 3) students demonstrated strong problem-solving outcomes.

Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry's model for intellectual development. The results show that students can reach the relativism stage of Perry's model in their first year of studies. Background: Students must move beyond a dualistic worldview to be engineers. Felder and Brent provided a list of recommendations to promote this type of intellectual development in students; active learning strategies strongly align with these recommendations. While active learning is common in programming courses (sometimes taking the form of project-based learning), they are typically tightly controlled by the instructor, and limited in scope (both in time and complexity), potentially reducing their impact on students. Intended Outcomes: This course and term-long project provided students a supportive environment in which to develop their decision-making skills, and promoted their intellectual development through Perry's stages related to software design. Application Design: Aligned with Felder and Brent's recommendations and Kuh's High Impact Practices, a course was built to: 1) teach students procedural programming, with 2) a focus on software design and open-ended problem solving, while maintaining 3) a supportive environment for skill acquisition. Findings: A mixed methods study showed the majority of students align themselves with the relativism stage of intellectual development at the end of the course. This study also illuminated the decision-making processes of teams of students in a first-year software design course.

Under the UK focused Greenhouse gAs and Uk and Global Emissions (GAUGE) project, two new tall tower greenhouse gas (GHG) observation sites were established in the 2013/2014 Northern Hemispheric winter. These sites were located at two existing telecommunications towers, Heathfield (HFD) and Bilsdale (BSD), utilised a combination of cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) and gas chromatography (GC) to measure key GHGs (CO2, CH4, CO, N2O and SF6). Measurements were made at multiple intake heights on each tower. The inclusion of the two additional tower stations within the existing UK Deriving Emissions linked to Climate Change (DECC) network of four stations was found to reduce the uncertainty of CH4 UK emission estimates by between 10-20 %. CO2 and CH4 dry mole fractions were calculated from either CRDS measurements of wet air which were post corrected with an instrument specific empirical correction or samples dried to between 0.05 and 0.3 % H2O using a Nafion dryer, with a smaller correction applied for the residual H2O. The impact of these two drying strategies was examined. Drying with a Nafion drier was not found to have a significant effect on the observed CH4 mole fraction; however, Nafion drying did cause a 0.02 μmol mol-1 CO2 bias. This bias was stable with sample CO2 mole fractions between 373 and 514 μmol mol-1 and for sample H2O up to 3.5 %. As the calibration and standard gases are treated in the same manner, this error is mostly calibrated out with the residual error below the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) reproducibility requirements. Of more concern was the error associated with both default factory and empirical instrument specific water correction algorithms. These corrections are relatively stable and reproducible for samples with H2O between 0.2 and 2.5 %, CO2 between 345 and 449 μmol mol-1 and CH4 between 1743 and 2145 nmol mol-1. However, the residual errors in these corrections increase to > 0.05 μmol mol-1 for CO2 and > 1 nmol mol-1 for CH4 (greater than the WMO internal reproducibility guidelines) at higher humidities and for samples with very low (< 0.5 %) water content. These errors were also found to scale with the absolute magnitude of the CO2 and CH4 mole fraction. As such, water corrections calculated in this manner are not suitable for samples with low (< 0.5 %) or high (> 2.5 %) water contents and either alternative correction methods should be used or partial drying or humidification considered prior to sample analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon nitride (CNx) film growth by 193 nm pulsed laser ablation of graphite in a low pressure of N2 has been investigated both by studying optical emission from the plume and by analyses of the composition, structure and bonding of material deposited at a range of substrate temperatures. Spectral analysis of the emission reveals the presence of C+ ions, C atoms, C2 and CN radicals and N2+ molecular ions within the ablation plume travelling towards the substrate. Films deposited at low substrate temperature (Tsub) are amorphous, with an N/C ratio of ∼20 at.%. Raman analysis shows CNx films grown at higher Tsub to be increasingly nanocrystalline, but thinner, and suggests that N inclusion encourages nanocrystallite formation. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals that CNx films grown at higher Tsub also have a reduced overall N content. The observations have been rationalised by assuming an increased propensity for sputtering or desorption of more labile CN species from the growing film surface at higher Tsub, resulting in a higher fraction of C&z.sbnd;C bonding—most probably in the form of graphitic nanocrystallites embedded in an amorphous matrix. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]