Two ME faculty receive 2006 College of Engineering Awards
Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching:
Professor Jay Martin
His students say that Jay Martin, the recipient of this year’s Benjamin Smith Reynolds award, is one of the most accessible, dedicated teachers they have ever had—someone who instilled ethics and pushed them to do better work than they ever imagined they could.
But perhaps the greatest testament to his dedication as an instructor is his energetic pursuit of ways in which he and others can improve teaching and learning. Among his endeavors, he is an active member of the UW-Madison Teaching Academy and an advocate of the concept inventory approach to teaching, which provides students immediate feedback on their comprehension of the material.
Harvey Spangler Award for Technology Enhanced Instruction:
Assistant Faculty Associate Erick Oberstar
This year’s Harvey Spangler award recipient, Erick Oberstar, recognized a need for greater efficiency in and accessibility to laboratory experiments for both on- and off-campus students. As a result, he developed a set of web-based experiments that students can conduct from any location, using real lab-based hardware.
The experiment system is a physical implementation, with live data and video feedback. Students have access to 11 different user interfaces, or web pages; each experiment enables them to download different parameters to the system, which then uploads live performance data. Each user interface provides students with graphs of live performance data and a downloadable file of their data. Students have 24/7 access to this system.
