Bluffton resident, Dr. John K. Estell, Ohio Northern University professor of computer engineering and computer science, and ONU student David Reeping, a senior in engineering education from Richfield, Ohio, were recipients of the Best Paper Award, Third Place, from the First-Year Programs Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) during the 122nd ASEE Annual Conference held June 14-17 in Seattle, Wash.

Their paper, “Providing Authentic Experiences in the First Year: Designing
Educational Software in Support of Service Learning Activities,” describes engineering education majors who acted as clients to teams of first-year students in Estell’s Programming 2 course. The engineering education majors were all associated with STEM teacher workshops conducted in the Dominican Republic by members of Northern Engineers Without Boundaries.

Each team was charged to develop a web-distributable software application in support of one of the lesson plans presented at the teacher workshops. Estell and Reeping’s paper was one of 153 submitted, and one of 103 accepted, by the Division.

Estell, along with Dr. Kris Jaeger-Helton of Northeastern University and Dr. Walter Schilling (a 1997 ONU engineering graduate) of the Milwaukee School of Engineering, developed and moderated a panel session at the ASEE Conference on “The State of the Electronic Textbook: A Spectrum of Views.” This session was listed in the ASEE Conference Connections Newsletter for June 2015 as one of the five “notable sessions” for the first full day of the Conference.

Estell also was appointed to the position of program chair-elect for the First-Year Programs Division; he will serve as the division’s program chair for the 124th ASEE Annual Conference to be held in 2017 in Columbus, Ohio.