A national organization of Electrical and Computer Engineering department heads has named Colorado State University’s department “Innovative Program of the Year.”
The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association, or ECEDHA represents more than 300 ECE departments in the United States and Canada.
CSU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, headed by Tony Maciejewski, received the honor for its work to reinvent the way students perceive and learn engineering through a cross-disciplinary partnership with Mathematics, the Institute for Learning and Teaching, Psychology and School of Education. The five-year project is supported by a $2 million Revolutionizing Engineering Departments grant, known as RED, from the National Science Foundation.
“ECEDHA is pleased to be affiliated with the National Science Foundation and the RED grant recipients, such as Colorado State University,” said John Janowiak, executive director of ECEDHA. “Their work in revolutionizing engineering education is critical to the ECE community. We are glad to recognize Colorado State for their innovative work and achievements thus far.”
Transforming teaching and learning
The ECEDHA Innovative Program Award was established to honor an individual or department that has created a successful, novel program that has produced measurable improvements in ECE education. In addition to recognizing the RED project team, the award recognizes Maciejewski for his leadership of the initiative.
As a result of the RED project, ECE faculty are working creatively and collaboratively to foster a more diverse and engaging learning environment to create career-ready engineers. Now in the final year of the project, their work has led to a new normal for teaching and learning that integrates content across the curriculum and blurs the lines between courses to show students what real engineering is.
Last fall, the RED project team received the 2019 Public Sector Project of the Year Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers Colorado Chapter. They were also honored by CSU in 2018 with the Provost’s N. Preston Davis Award for Instructional Innovation.
