Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset Using the KEEN Framework for a Digital Communication System Course

Abstract

John Santiago has been a technical engineer, manager, and executive with more than 26 years of leadership positions in technical program management, acquisition development and operation research support while in the United States Air Force. He currently has over 16 years of teaching experience at the university level and taught over 40 different graduate and undergraduate courses in electrical engineering, systems engineering, physics and mathematics. He has over 30 published papers and/or technical presentations while spearheading over 40 international scientific and engineering conferences/workshops as a steering committee member while assigned in Europe. Professor Santiago has experience in many engineering disciplines and missions including: control and modeling of large flexible space structures, communications system, electro-optics, high-energy lasers, missile seekers/sensors for precision guided munitions, image processing/recognition, information technologies, space, air and missile warning, missile defense, and homeland defense.His interests includes: interactive multimedia for e-books, interactive video learning, and 3D/2D animation. Professor Santiago recently published a book entitled, "Circuit Analysis for Dummies" in 2013 after being discovered on YouTube. Professor Santiago received several teaching awards from the United States Air Force Academy and CTU. In 2015, he was awarded CTU's Faculty of the Year for Teaching Innovations. Professor Santiago has been a 12-time invited speaker in celebration of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month giving multi-media presentations on leadership, diversity and opportunity at various military installations in Colorado and Wyoming.

Using the KEEN Framework and the System Engineering Approach for Design and Development of Affordable Wireless Power Transfer using Inductive Coupling for Application in Earphone Charging

“…Based on the recent experience with entrepreneurial-minded learning (EML), CoE believes this teaching approach proved useful to engage students in coming up with relevant ideas for projects and classroom activities that create market value. CoE also believes that the combination of embedded EML ( [1] [2] [3] [4]) activities and system engineering provides a rewarding learning experience for students while communicating the project's societal and economic value to their employers. CoE also believes that the system thinking found in the entrepreneurial concept is aligned with the System Engineering approach used by CoE for the last several years in making project ideas become reality ( [5] [6] [7] [8]).…”

“…[3] [4]. By incorporating EML in different course sequences such as circuits, electronic design, and communication sequences, students will have the opportunity to develop and build up their entrepreneurial mindset before taking the capstone courses [1] [2] [3] [4].…”

“…A few examples from Colorado Technical University of EML classroom activities were presented at the workshop and implemented in a number of courses described below. [1]. This set of EML activities was implemented for both undergraduate and graduate courses in digital communications.…”

“…An end of course survey and positive student feedback are presented shown in Figure 3 for this implementation of EML activities. Detailed discussion on the results and set of EML activities are described in another paper [1].…”

“…Although CoE emphasized to students that capstone projects must fill a customer need during the past several years, a visual framework is desired to give students more direction and structure so that their capstone projects (or senior design projects) can be expanded to have more relevant market value. The intent of the entrepreneurial approach is not to graduate students who will start their own businesses (although some of the engineering alumni have already done so), but to motivate and create value for themselves and their employer that benefits society by developing their entrepreneurial mindset [1] [2] [3] [4].…”