USMA Digital Commons (United States Military Academy, West Point)
Not a member yet
1355 research outputs found
Sort by
Framework for Conducting a Technical Communication Crosswalk across a Chemical Engineering Curriculum
No full textTechnical communication is an extremely important soft skill for young engineers entering the workplace. Undergraduate engineering programs normally address technical communications, but many do not provide intentionally placed discipline-specific technical communication experiences designed to progressively increase technical communication skills. This study presents an analysis of the technical skill requirement by international accrediting organizations for communication literacy, as well as an analysis of some technical communication education approaches within chemical engineering curricula. This study also presents methods for conducting a crosswalk of graded events with a technical communication component across a curriculum, which can help a program understand the placement of technical communication graded events and identify opportunities for reallocation or scaffolding. This study employs a survey-based approach for gathering information about all technical communication graded events within a chemical engineering curriculum and a method for assessing placement and scaffolding opportunities using a longitudinal crosswalk of all applicable courses from freshman to senior year. Results from this study suggest that the U.S. Military Academy (West Point)’s chemical engineering program has 74 technical communication graded events, which were highly concentrated in the junior year. Most events were lab reports (55 %) assessed for content only or team events (78 %). Opportunities for scaffolding across courses were identified and the content for a 1.0-credit seminar course are presented. The methods presented in this study can be used by other engineering programs to identify gaps in technical communication education and methods for improvement within their curriculum
An Experiential Exercise for Teaching Theories of Work Motivation: Using a Game to Teach Equity and Expectancy Theories
Get PDFPurpose: This paper aims to provide an experiential exercise for management and leadership educators to use in the course of their teaching duties.
Design/methodology/approach: The approach of this classroom teaching method uses an experiential exercise to teach Adams’ equity theory and Vroom’s expectancy theory.
Findings: This experiential exercise has proven useful in teaching two major theories of motivation and is often cited as one of the more memorable classes students experience.
Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is an original experiential exercise for teaching the equity and expectancy theories of motivation
Autonomous Airborne Multi-Rotor UAS Delivery System
Get PDFWithin current combat environments, there is a demand for rapid and extremely precise re-supply missions. Typical combat airdrops require long periods of planning and can produce a large signature in an operating environment which relies on stealth for various mission sets. Team Hermes, made up of four members from the West Point graduating class of 2019, offers a new re-supply method to answer this demand. The design will allow for the delivery of a quadcopter carrying 1.5 pounds of cargo within a 5-meter radius of an impact point on the ground
Autonomous Teammates for Squad Tactics
No full textThe United States Department of Defense seeks to integrate small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into infantry squads and develop tactics, techniques, and procedures using unmanned systems. Through an iterative design process consisting of live-fly tactical exercises, this research investigates the teaming of humans with unmanned aerial systems. Exercises involve force on force engagements to encourage the development of tactics and procedures for the future operating environment. Three successful mission tactics for leveraging UAS in missions are defined. In addition to autonomy, teams leverage convolutional and artificial deep neural networks running real time on aerial video feeds to identify and classify combatants and friendly forces
Engineering Creativity: Ideas from the Visual Arts for Engineering Programs
No full textEngineers being educated today must be creative and innovative. An important part of developing creative and innovative solutions is the framework within which students are taught to think and formulate ideas. The scientific method is among the first such framework taught to students as early as elementary school and reinforced into college. Within engineering curricula, students are introduced to an engineering design process. These methods are valuable but do not necessarily translate to developing creative ability that can be more broadly applied. In fine art programs, however, deliberate effort is made to develop creative abilities in addition to learning technical processes within which to showcase that creativity. This paper compares the scientific method, engineering design process, and creative methods taught in the fine arts. Through this comparison, commonalities are identified and insights from fine arts creative methods are applied to the engineering curriculum
Insights into Expertise and Tactics in Human-Robot Teaming
No full textAs robot capabilities rapidly evolve, the dynamics of human-robot teams will change. Autonomous, intelligent technologies will come to serve in roles that more closely resemble those of teammates, as opposed to tools. This will require humans to adapt and remain agile in developing novel strategies and tactics for employing these systems in complex, real-world scenarios. Building on previous work that presented a novel data set collected from teams of humans and robots playing capture the flag, the current research aims to identify measures capable of predicting successful teaming that lead to a positive, winning outcomes in the game. Video and text log analysis were used to describe gameplay and identify specific successful tactics. In conjunction with the experience levels of the participants, a number of measures of communication with autonomous robot teammates and robot efficiency were used to predict game performance. Only one metric was found to successfully predict game outcomes across all four games: level of robot involvement with offensive maneuvers. Several possible mechanisms for this observation are discussed, as well as multiple directions for future research directions leveraging this human-robot teaming platform
Electronic Warfare in the Suwalki Gap: Facing the Russian “Accompli Attack”
No full textThe Joint Operating Environment 2035 predicts that for the foreseeable future, U.S. national interests will face challenges from both persistent disorders and states contesting international norms.1 One of these outfalls could be “accompli” attacks from near-peer and peer states to exploit disorder, challenge international norms, and enjoy a quick advance with a limited resistance that cannot be realistically reversed. The rapid attack could establish territorial gains requiring a large-scale land war to liberate—with the imminent threat of an escalation to nuclear war—and the potentially massive cost in life, pain, and devastation to reverse the attacker’s gains could be used to get negotiation leverage for the attacker in a final peace settlement. The attacker could also escalate the conflict once its territorial objectives are reached by declaring that a counteroffensive by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could face a tactical nuclear response, practically denying the Alliance the option to free the occupied territory with conventional military means
Dean\u27s Significant Activities Report 07-31-2020
Get PDFThe Dean’s Weekly Significant Activities Report lists all activities conducted within the Departments, Centers & Staff. The Report is provided to the Dean and Directorate personnel for situational awareness.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/sigact/1030/thumbnail.jp
A Celebration of West Point Authors, Jan-Jun 2020
Get PDFHighlighting the 218 collected works of scholarship published and presented between January - June 2020.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/books/1028/thumbnail.jp