Engineering in the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Projects in the Arts and Engineering
Elizabeth Wuerffel, Jeffrey D. Will · 2015
since August of 2001.He teaches courses in senior design, computer architecture, digital signal processing, freshman topics, and circuits laboratories and is heavily involved in working with students in undergraduate research.Will is also a 2013 recipient of the Illinois-Indiana ASEE Section Outstanding Teacher Award.Upon coming to Valparaiso University, Will established the Scientific Visualization Laboratory (SVL), a facility dedicated to the use of Virtual Reality (VR) for undergraduate education.Working exclusively with undergraduate students, Will developed VR hardware and software to be used in undergraduate STEM curricula.Under his direction, his students have developed over fourteen different software packages to be used in such educational fields as electromagnetics, vector calculus, statics, and materials science: all topics where students can benefit from a rich visual experience.Will currently advises twelve undergraduates in scientific visualization projects.Additionally, Will is an avid collaborator with colleagues outside the engineering discipline and has demonstrated visualization and virtual reality applications in psychology, foreign languages, photography, drawing, music, and library science.He is co-author of the textbook "Developing Virtual Reality Applications" and has published numerous pedagogical articles on the use of virtual reality for teaching.His contributions range from U.S. Patents to art exhibits.Will is active in K-12 outreach efforts where his Virtual Reality system serves as a vehicle to interest students in STEM fields.He has given hundreds of demonstrations of the system to over 1200 visitors and works closely with local schools, especially those with underserved populations.He is active in partnering with the Valparaiso Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Chapter to mentor and provide visit days to middle-school girls.He has also worked with colleagues at Iowa State to develop the educational program "Boomtown," with the goal of interesting middle-school girls in computer programming.After working with the SWE chapter closely for the past ten years, Will was named advisor for the chapter in the fall of 2013.Will has been an active member of ASEE throughout his professional career, serving as an officer in his local section from 2002-2007 (Chair in 2005) and attending and publishing at national and sectional conferences.