Aluminum oxide, both in amorphous and crystalline forms, is a widely used inorganic ceramic material because of its chemical and structural properties. In this work, we synthesized amorphous aluminum oxide nanoparticles using a capacitively coupled nonthermal plasma utilizing trimethylaluminum and oxygen as precursors and studied their crystallization and phase transformation behavior through postsynthetic annealing. The use of two reactor geometries resulted in amorphous aluminum oxide nanoparticles with similar compositions but different sizes. Size tuning of these nanoparticles was achieved by varying the reactor pressure to produce amorphous aluminum oxide nanoparticles ranging from 6 to 22 nm. During postsynthetic annealing, powder samples of amorphous nanoparticles began to crystallize at 800 °C, forming crystalline θ and γ phase alumina. Their phase transformation behavior was found to be size-dependent in that powders of small 6 nm amorphous particles transformed to form phase-pure α-Al 2 O 3 at 1100 °C, while powders of large 11 nm particles remained in the θ and γ phases. This phenomenon is attributed to the fast rate of densification and neck formation in small amorphous aluminum oxide particles.
James Coller is an engineering graduate student at the University of Michigan where he also completed his B.S. in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering in 2017. He spent three years during his undergraduate education as an Instructional Assistant for a first year engineering course. His research interests include autonomous robotics for both land and marine environments as well as naval ship design problems. Mr. Magel Su, University of MichiganMagel Su is a current undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying materials science and engineering with a minor in chemistry. He is also a member of the engineering honors program, an instructor for a first-year engineering design course, and a researcher in the Yalisove Lab Group. Assessment of Peer Mentoring of Teams in a First Year Design-Build-TestCommunicate Class AbstractPeer mentoring has been associated with beneficial outcomes in higher education, from increased retention of minority students [1] and women [2] to learning gains for both mentors and mentees [3] . Most of the peer mentoring relationships investigated in the literature are of mentors not tied to a specific course [e.g., 2 ]. This paper reports on how one section of a first year, intensive, projectbased learning class uses peer mentors to guide student teams throughout a design-build-test project in a first year engineering course.Our one-semester course is a four-credit combined technical and communication course. Students work in teams of four or five students to design, build, and test two underwater vessels (one an unpowered bathysphere, one a remotely operated vehicle [ROV]), as well as to report on those designs. Former students of the course participate as peer mentors, working directly with a single team to guide design decisions and provide feedback on all facets of the design and communication process.In Fall 2016, we conducted an assessment of our current peer mentoring system by surveying students and peer mentors. As all students in our section experience mentoring, we did not have a comparison group, but we did seek to understand the benefits and drawbacks of mentoring for both students and mentors. From this survey, as well as our experiences facilitating the course with peer mentors for eight semesters, we are able to report a few "best practices" for facilitating the peer mentoring experience in our context. Importantly, we find that both students and mentors benefit from the mentoring experience, enough to justify our efforts to manage it. We do note potential disadvantages of mentors, as well as possible ways to mediate these drawbacks. This report contains the results of the survey, as well as instructor conclusions on what aspects of the peer mentoring experience are most important for successful implementation.
Team-based assignments and other collaborative learning methods are common in undergraduate engineering programs across the world, and they are especially prevalent in first-year introductory engineering courses as well as final-year capstone projects. Team-based learning has been shown in previous studies to improve students' academic achievement, persistence, intrinsic motivation, and attitude toward subject areas compared to more traditional methods of learning, and it can be a powerful tool for increasing self-efficacy and experience by allowing students to define their own roles on teams. However, despite the literature supporting team-based learning, it is not a universally positive experience for all students, particularly in cases where team difficulties may intensify pre-existing inequities in the classroom. Because students composing a team can come from vastly different academic backgrounds with different levels of experience with engineering, a team's overall performance may be linked to the performance of students on individual assignments.In this paper, we investigate how individual student performance is related to overall student team performance in a first-year engineering design-build-test-communicate course. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between individual students' ratings of their teams and teammates and the scores earned collectively by the team. Specifically, we analyze student responses to weekly team checks, individual student performance ratings as rated by their teammates, and individual student performance on individual class assignments, and compare these metrics to the overall team grades earned by their respective team. The results suggest a positive, though insignificant, trend between teams with more positive weekly team checks and higher overall team grades. We also find a significant trend between teammates who rate each other highly for "producing quality work" and earning higher grades on the team project. Furthermore, we find that individual student performance is not significantly correlated with grades earned on the team project. Finally, we observe a negative, though insignificant, trend between teams with a higher standard deviation of individual student exam performances (bigger spread) and overall team grades. That is, teams with more dispersion in exam performance earn lower grades in this sample.
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