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- Creators: Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs
- Creators: Chemical Engineering Program
Description
Teaching methods in the present day are beginning to transition from the traditional lecture style to the flipped learning style. The flipped classroom, also known as an engaged learning classroom, follows the model where students are presented with lecture material prior to attending class. Instead of being lectured in class, they work on applications of the material with the help of their peers and the instructional staff. One component that many engaged learning environments have in common is lecture videos for the students to view prior to attending class. An undergraduate civil engineering course at Arizona State University is modeled using an engaged learning environment; however, it does not provide lecture videos for the students. Many students in this course are seeing an engaged learning environment for the first time and need guidance on how to prepare for the course, how to approach course material, and how to interpret feedback, in addition to getting help in the technical concepts. This project aims to create supplemental lecture videos based on the concepts that students in the class identified as needing more information, as well as topics that will help students make this transition to an engaged learning environment. A series of sixteen videos were created and posted for the students to view prior to attending recitation periods. The feedback from the students regarding the videos was studied and implementation techniques for future semesters were tested.
ContributorsFlys, Victoria Pilar (Author) / Hjelmstad, Keith (Thesis director) / Baisley, Amie (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
The civil engineering curriculum includes the engineering fields of environmental, geotechnical, hydrology, structural, and transportation. A particular focus on the structural engineering curriculum outline involves courses in mathematics, engineering mechanics, structural analysis, and structural design. The core structural analysis and design course at Arizona State University (CEE 321) is a transition course to connect realistic structural design and analysis concepts to an engineering foundation created by the first and second year mathematics and mechanics courses. CEE 321 is styled after a flipped classroom model and students are assessed through quizzes, midterms, design projects, and a final exam. Student performance was evaluated for the Spring 2013 and Fall 2013 semesters through an error analysis technique designed to categorize student mistakes based on type of error and related topic. This analysis revealed that student's basic engineering mechanics skills improved throughout the course as well as identified the areas that students struggle in. The slope-deflection and direct stiffness methods of analysis and calculating cross-sectional properties are the primary areas of concern. Using appropriate technology in the engineering classroom has the potential to enhance the learning environment and address the areas of inadequacy identified by the performance analysis. A survey of CEE 321 students demonstrated that technology is a highly integrated and useful portion of student's lives. Therefore, the engineering classroom should reflect this. Through the use of analysis and design software, students are able to begin to develop design intuition and understanding while completing realistic engineering projects in their third year of undergraduate studies. Additionally, incorporating internet resources into and outside of the classroom allows students to be connected to course content from any web-enabled device of their choice. Lecture videos posted online covering the course content were requested by many CEE 321 students and are an emerging resource that supplements the flipped classroom model. The availability of such a tool allows students to revisit concepts that they do not understand or pause, rewind, and replay the lectures when necessary. An expansion of the structural analysis and design online lecture videos for CEE 321 are expected to address and improve the areas that students struggle in as identified by the error analysis.
ContributorsMika, Krista Nicole (Author) / Rajan, Subramaniam (Thesis director) / Mamlouk, Michael (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Various reports produced by the National Research Council suggest that K-12 curricula expand Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics to better help students develop their ability to reason and employ scientific habits rather than simply building scientific knowledge. Every spring, the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) in conjunction with Arizona State University holds a professional development workshop titled "Engineering Practices in the Secondary Science Classroom: Engineering Training for Grade 6-12 Math and Science School Teams". This workshop provides math and science teachers with the opportunity to either sustain existing engineering proficiency or be exposed to engineering design practices for the first time. To build teachers' proficiency with employing engineering design practices, they follow a two-day curriculum designed for application in both science and math classrooms as a conjoined effort. As of spring 2015, very little feedback has been received concerning the effectiveness of the ASU-ADE workshops. New feedback methods have been developed for future deployment as past and more informal immediate feedback from teachers and students was used to create preliminary changes in the workshop curriculum. In addition, basic laboratory testing has been performed to further link together engineering problem solving with experiments and computer modelling. In improving feedback and expanding available material, the curriculum was analyzed and improved to more effectively train teachers in engineering practices and implement these practices in their classrooms.
ContributorsSchmidt, Nathan William (Author) / Rajan, Subramaniam (Thesis director) / Neithalath, Narayanan (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Engineering has historically been dominated by White men. However, in modern history, engineering is becoming more diverse as the opportunity to pursue engineering has become accessible to people of all races and genders. Yet, college ready high school students from nontraditional backgrounds—women, ethnic minorities, first-generation-to-college students, and those with financial need—often lack exposure to engineering, thus reducing their likelihood to pursue a career in this field. To create engineering learning experiences that can be expanded to a traditional high school science classroom, the Young Engineers Shape the World program at Arizona State University was consulted. The Young Engineers Shape the World program encourages women, notably the most underrepresented group in the engineering field, as well as other students of diverse backgrounds, to pursue engineering. The goal of this effort was to create a 3-contact hour chemical engineering based learning experience to help students in grades 10-11 learn about an application of chemical engineering. Using knowledge of chemical engineering, a soil pH testing activity was created, simulating a typical high school chemistry science experiment. In addition to measuring pH, students were asked to build a modern garden that contained a physical barrier that could protect the garden from acid rain while still allowing sunlight to reach the plant. Student feedback was collected in the form of an experience evaluation survey after each experience. Students found that the soil-moisture quality testing and design of a protective barrier was engaging. However, an iterative curriculum redesign-implement-evaluate effort is needed to arrive at a robust chemical engineering based design learning experience.
ContributorsOtis, Timothy Kevin (Author) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam (Thesis director) / Schoepf, Jared (Committee member) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This study was conducted to look for ways to improve engineering school in order to maximize student benefit. The results of the survey showed that additional communication and professional interaction lessons as well as more emphasis on software and programming languages would help prepare engineers for their careers. There was unanimous support of communication materials from survey respondents, with constructive confrontation and career path discussion receiving the most positive feedback. Due to the unanimous support of communications material, and the fact that short communications lessons could drive home key points without adding too much work to engineering students’ already busy schedules, two short lesson outlines for constructive confrontation and career path discussion were produced for this study.
ContributorsWolin, Nathan Maxwell (Author) / Taylor, David (Thesis director) / Holloway, Julianne (Committee member) / Chemical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Engineers spend several years studying intense technical details of the processes that shape our world, yet few are exposed to classes addressing social behaviors or issues. Engineering culture creates specific barriers to addressing social science issues, such as unconscious bias, within engineering classrooms. I developed a curriculum that uses optical illusions, Legos, and the instructor's vulnerability to tackle unconscious bias in a way that addresses the barriers in engineering culture that prevent engineers from learning social science issues. Unconscious bias has documented long-term negative impacts on success and personal development, even in engineering environments. Creating a module in engineering education that addresses unconscious bias with the aim of reducing the negative effects of bias would benefit developing engineers by improving product development and team diversity. Engineering culture fosters disengagement with social issues through three pillars: depoliticization, technical/social dualism, and meritocracy. The developed curriculum uses optical illusions and Legos as proxies to start discussions about unconscious bias. The proxies allow engineers to explore their own biases without running into one of the pillars of disengagement that limits the engineer's willingness to discuss social issues. The curriculum was implemented in the Fall of 2017 in an upper-division engineering classroom as a professional communication module. The module received qualitatively positive feedback from fellow instructors and students. The curriculum was only implemented once by the author, but future implementations should be done with a different instructor and using quantitative data to measure if the learning objectives were achieved. Appendix A of the paper contains a lesson plan of the module that could be implemented by other instructors.
ContributorsLauber, Emily Anne (Author) / Wernimont, Jacqueline (Thesis director) / Mertz, Benjamin (Committee member) / Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering Programs (Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05