Clinical Associate Professor Krishna Pakala in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering was a keynote speaker at the 87th annual Pacific Northwest Section – American Society for Engineering Education held March 20-22 at Oregon State University. His talk was titled “Transforming Engineering Education by Leveraging Technology and Building Community.” Pakala also served as the program chair for this conference.
Lana Grover, a senior instructor design consultant at the IDEA Shop, and Pakala facilitated a two-hour workshop titled “Advancing Mechanical Engineering Education Through Mobile Learning Micro-Workshop Training.” Devshikha Bose, an instructor design consultant at the IDEA Shop also supported the development and planning of this workshop.
Pakala’s undergraduate research assistant, Samantha Schauer, a mechanical engineering student and HERC fellowship recipient, also presented a paper titled “Review of Living Learning Communities and their impact on first year engineering college students.” The other co-authors of this paper were Pakala and Kim Tucker, a doctoral student in the College of Education and also the residential coordinator for learning at Boise State.
Another undergraduate research assistant, mechanical engineering student David Pinkerton, presented his co-authored paper with Pakala titled “Review of Educational technology: closing the gap between modern technology and the college engineering classroom.”
At the awards ceremony, Pakala received the 2019 Section Outstanding Campus Representative award for the Pacific Northwest section for his dedication and valuable services rendered toward furthering the goals of engineering education. He now will be considered at the national level for the Zone Outstanding Campus Representative award.