Search for: All records

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]