While many institutions express interest in integrating sustainability into their civil engineering curriculum, the engineering community lacks consensus on established methods for infusing sustainability into curriculum and verified approaches to assess engineers' sustainability knowledge. This paper presents the development of a sustainability rubric and application of the rubric to civil engineering senior design capstone projects to evaluate students' sustainability knowledge at two institutions. The rubric built upon previous assessment approaches to 2 FALL 2017
ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATIONUtilizing Civil Engineering Senior Design Capstone Projects to Evaluate Students' Sustainability Education across Engineering Curriculum evaluate student reports for nine different factors including dimensions of sustainability, Bloom's taxonomy, sustainability links, drivers for including sustainability, location of sustainability within report, qualitative/quantitative incorporation, sustainability source/reference, and sustainability topics. The sustainability content within Spring 2014, Fall 2014, and Spring 2015 senior design capstone projects from university A (UA, n = 181 students, n p = 28 projects) and university B (UB, n = 106 students, n p = 15 projects) was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach. The mixed-methods assessment included observation of student project presentations and evaluation of student reports via rubric. Rubric evaluation of student reports revealed that students' performance in senior design projects is primarily driven by their instructor's expectations; if sustainability is not a major deliverable, then students are less likely to integrate sustainability concepts that they learned from prior classes in their reports. To make sustainability a priority, senior design project requirements should be updated to explicitly require holistic sustainability applications. Instructors could approach raising sustainability expectations by engaging a sustainability expert as an advisor to the senior design course and/or utilizing a sustainability expert as project mentor, as demonstrated in the success of one senior design project at each institution during this study.
Urban airspace environments present exciting new opportunities for delivering drone services to an increasingly large global market, including: information gathering; package delivery; air-taxi services. A key challenge is how to model airspace environments over densely populated urban spaces, coupled with the design and development of scalable traffic management systems that may need to handle potentially hundreds to thousands of drone movements per hour. This paper explores the background to Urban unmanned traffic management (UTM), examining high-level initiatives, such as the USA’s Unmanned Air Traffic (UTM) systems and Europe’s U-Space services, as well as a number of contemporary research activities in this area. The main body of the paper describes the initial research outputs of the U-Flyte R&D group, based at Maynooth University in Ireland, who have focused on developing an integrated approach to airspace modelling and traffic management platforms for operating large drone fleets over urban environments. This work proposes pragmatic and innovative approaches to expedite the roll-out of these much-needed urban UTM solutions. These approaches include the certification of drones for urban operation, the adoption of a collaborative and democratic approach to designing urban airspace, the development of a scalable traffic management and the replacement of direct human involvement in operating drones and coordinating drone traffic with machines. The key fundamental elements of airspace architecture and traffic management for busy drone operations in urban environments are described together with initial UTM performance results from simulation studies.
Kristen Parrish is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University (ASU). Kristen's work focuses on integrating energy efficiency measures into building design, construction, and operations processes. Specifically, she is interested in novel design processes that financially and technically facilitate energy-efficient buildings. Her work also explores how principles of lean manufacturing facilitate energy-efficiency in the commercial building industry. Another research interest of Kristen's is engineering education, where she explores how project-and experience-based learning foster better understanding of engineering and management principles. Prior to joining ASU, Kristen was at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then a Scientific Engineering Associate (2011)(2012) in the Building Technologies and Urban Systems Department. She worked in the Commercial Buildings group, developing energy efficiency programs and researching technical and non-technical barriers to energy efficiency in the buildings industry. She has a background in collaborative design and integrated project delivery. She holds a BS and MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Civil Engineering Systems from University of California Berkeley. Her research ranges from design of systems based on industrial ecology and byproduct synergies, life cycle and sustainability assessments of biopolymers and biofuels, and design and analysis of sustainable solutions for healthcare. Since 2007, she has lead seven federal research projects and collaborated on many more, totaling over $7M in research, with over $12M in collaborative research. At ASU, Dr. Landis continues to grow her research activities and collaborations to include multidisciplinary approaches to sustainable systems with over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Landis is dedicated to sustainability engineering education and outreach; she works with local high schools, after school programs, local nonprofit organizations, and museums to integrate sustainability and engineering into K-12 and undergraduate curricula. Complex global challenges require multidisciplinary, sustainable solutions; the next generation of engineering students must be prepared to apply sustainability concepts to solve these challenges. Many undergraduate engineering students, however, report that they do not feel prepared to address these challenges because they were not introduced to these concepts during their engineering education. In addition, students report educational deficiencies of real world engineering and applied sustainability concepts as areas that need critical improvement in their education. This NSF TUES 2 project evaluates two methods for integrating grand challenges and sustainability into engineering curricula, termed as the stand-alone course method, and the module method. In the stand-alone course method, engineering programs establish one to two distinct courses t...
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