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Hands-on design experiences to introduce first year students to chemical engineering are limited.[1] The College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology (CEAT) Summer Bridge Program at Oklahoma State University is a three-week camp designed to acclimate first year students to college life while providing calculus and physics preparatory short courses and design experiences from multiple disciplines in CEAT.[2] Since first-year students enjoy and value hands-on experiences,[2] we have developed a hands-on design module on the topic of pharmaceutical dosing for the chemical engineering portion of the Summer Bridge Program. We have taught the design module in nine sessions that were each two hours per day over three days during the 2015 – 2018 offerings of the Summer Bridge Program. The detailed lesson plan for using the design module to introduce mass balance and design concepts and an overview of the initial version of the MATLAB app were discussed in our previous ASEE conference proceedings paper.[2] In the present work, we discuss a redesigned MATLAB app (Figure 1) that has been expanded from two drugs and four cases to five drugs and eight cases. The new version of the MATLAB app is available as SB17CHE.mlappinstall on our GitHub repository.[3] Any future updates to the software will be released to the same archive. Additionally, we include a new section focused on our experiences in teaching chemical engineering design concepts using the MATLAB app and in responding to typical student questions. Our aim is to provide a tutorial for other educators interested in using the MATLAB app in their classroom or outreach activities related to chemical engineering design. For those interested in creating similar computational instructional tools, we have published details regarding the software implementation of the app and its documentation.[4]
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Chemical Engineering for Middle School Girls (Resource Exchange)
As part of an NSF CAREER project [blinded] , [blinded university] developed a one-week chemical engineering summer workshop targeted at middle school girls with the goal of bolstering participation and interest in the field by presenting chemical engineering as a creative and dynamic field. This paper will present a spherification activity which introduces chemical reactions, membranes, resource management, engineering design, and more. Furthermore, links to the full set of activities developed for the week that can be used individually or collectively are provided. In the summer program, students engage in experiments providing simplified background knowledge on foreign material such as chemical reactions, polymer morphology, separations, and thermodynamics. The students then work on hands-on activities to solve engineering design problems using learned information. For the final activity, students collaboratively design a process to scale up a spherification experiment
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- Award ID(s):
- 1553661
- PAR ID:
- 10191539
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Chemical Engineering for Middle School Girls
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech hosts a five-week program for incoming students each summer, also known as a summer bridge program (SBP). As part of the program, first-time-in-college students become acclimated with the university setting and community prior to the start of their academic career. Students take non-credit courses in subjects that are historically challenging and required for first-year students, such as calculus, chemistry, and engineering fundamentals. Throughout the program, students also participate in informational seminars presented by various offices on campus to understand the range of opportunities and resources available to them. In light of participation occurring prior to the official start of the semester, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of this program in shaping the expectations that participating students have of the undergraduate engineering program. To address this purpose, we analyzed a) written student responses from a workshop activity, b) data from semi-structured interviews that occurred after the workshop, and 3) responses to an exit survey administered at the conclusion of the five-week program. Combined, these data sources shed light on expectations students developed by the end of the program. We found that students emerged from the SBP with varying degrees of expectations regarding the alignment between the SBP experience and a college semester in engineering. We also found that students’ experiences and observations led them to recognize that marginalization exists in engineering while they also viewed engineering as a level playing field. We uncovered that when asked how they would respond to challenging situations, students relied on what they learned about during the SBP. Finally, we conclude with questions based on a transition theory in student development for practitioners to consider when developing or implementing a SBP.more » « less
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It is important for future engineers to understand themselves in relation to the many cultural influences they may encounter during their career, and to confront their own biases when interacting with colleagues whose cultural backgrounds are different from their own. This paper describes and evaluates a series of nine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops developed and implemented during the summer of 2022 for high school and entering first-year college students enrolled in the Research, Academics, and Mentoring Pathways (RAMP) six week engineering summer bridge program at University of Massachusetts Lowell. The workshops incorporated activities designed to create an environment fostering respect, belonging, and acceptance to make teamwork more inclusive and effective. Each workshop was based on collaborative learning and used a broad range of strategies to engage students as active participants in learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion within the context of teamwork. To develop the workshops, the facilitators aligned the activities with key themes from chapters in the book From Athletics to Engineering: 8 Ways to Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for All [1]. The summer bridge program was evaluated using quantitative and qualitative data collected throughout the program and upon its conclusion tracking students’ reactions and levels of engagement in each of the program components. This included a pre-survey, mid-semester survey, post-survey, and weekly journal prompts on Google Classroom. We also used the Universality-Diversity scale [2] to measure any pre-post changes in students’ attitudes towards diversity. With regard to the workshops, an analysis of student responses indicated a high level of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. Students reported they enjoyed getting to know each other better and that the DEI activities were interactive, educational, and engaging.more » « less
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null (Ed.)We worked with local K–6 teachers to develop lesson plans that would connect a 50-minute engineering design challenge, completed during a field trip, to the students’ classroom learning. The result was a model for designing pre-visit classroom activities that develop students’ familiarity with phenomena, tools, and processes that will be used during the field trip and post-visit classroom activities that provide students with opportunities to reflect on some of their field trip experiences. While the field trip activity alone is an exciting and productive learning opportunity, students who complete the full set of classroom and field trip activities participate in a richer experience that engages them in more of the practices of science and engineering and more fully develops the disciplinary core ideas related to engineering and physical science. Each Engineering Exploration module includes four activities: an engineering design activity completed during a field trip to an interactive science museum, accompanied by two preactivities and one post activity done in students’ classroom and facilitated by their elementary school teacher. While each classroom activity was designed to take no more than 50 minutes, many teachers found it valuable to extend each lesson to allow for deeper discussion and engagement with the activities. The classroom experiences presented here are associated with a field trip program in which students iteratively design a craft out of paper and tape that will hover above a “fire” (upward moving column of air) while carrying a “sensor” (washer). The classroom activities surrounding this field trip help students develop conceptual understandings of forces to navigate the engineering design challenge.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34278
