Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to report on the Multidisciplinary Sustainability Education Project (MSEP) as a framework using sustainability-themed education modules to introduce students to the need for multidisciplinary approaches to solving twenty-first-century problems while retaining traditional course strengths and content. Design/methodology/approach -The MSEP uses sustainability-themed education models and a multidisciplinary approach to link courses across disciplines. Modules are identified by an overarching question with activities designed to address the overarching question from course-specific perspectives, resulting in students writing short technical reports summarizing their results. Students then read and evaluate technical reports from other classes, and complete a summary activity designed to connect perspectives from different disciplines. Findings -The multi-method assessment identified no loss or gain in discipline-specific learning; increased understanding about the characteristics of twenty-first-century problems, in particular those related to sustainability; and increased students' favorable perceptions of introductory calculus. Assessment of increased understanding of how different disciplines can work together to understand complex problems was difficult to measure due to limitations of a project-developed assessment instrument. Originality/value -This paper contributes to undergraduate sustainability education by describing a framework for connecting courses using sustainability-themed modules. By implementing an asynchronous manner where courses use materials from the project Web site and contribute materials to the Web site after implementing a module, it is easy to incorporate a module into existing courses, any educational institution's existing structure and across institutions. The framework's flexible design allows new courses from any discipline to connect to a module, allowing for multidisciplinary connections to grow over time.
We describe an upper-division experiment in thermal physics where students measure the tension of a rubber band as a function of temperature and length and use a Maxwell relation to find the change in internal energy and entropy for an isothermal stretch. This allows students to experimentally check the predictions of the entropic spring model for elastomers and observe that the entropy does indeed decrease as a rubber band is stretched.
Water is known as being a dominant factor in ground-penetrating radar reflection and transmission from subsurface interfaces. Before embarking on a multi-season, large-scale survey of late Bronze Age cities in Cyprus we wanted to empirically identify the impact of seasonal moisture on ground-penetrating radar transmission and reflection from buried Late Bronze Age architecture to determine the optimum time of the year to conduct our surveys. Having conducted preliminary surveys under dry conditions to support a grant proposal we were then in a position to return to the site during wet conditions after receiving our funding and before beginning our full-scale project. We report here a comparison of the ground-penetrating radar results at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios during a drought year (summer 2008, 54% normal) versus a roughly average year (spring 2010, 109% normal) conditions, which identified drier conditions as providing the best data for interpreting Late Bronze Age urban planning given the methods employed.
During the past two years, we have been creating curricular material centered around complex problems rooted in sustainability. Since multidisciplinary learning is one of our primary goals, these projects are most meaningful when they connect students from different disciplines working toward a common understanding. However, strong disciplinary components present in their solutions also allow us to frame these projects from strictly disciplinary perspectives; in this paper, we show how they can be used for increased engagement in the context of data structures and algorithms. In an earlier publication, we presented a project for computer science students to analyze the changes in the size and the ice-concentrations of the Arctic. In this paper, we review two new ones to explore (i) the structural characteristics of the western part of the U.S. power-grid, and (ii) challenges of sustainably harvesting fish.
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