An Integrated Approach to Energy Education in Engineering

Abstract

What do engineering students in 2020 need to know about energy to be successful in the workplace and contribute to addressing society’s issues related to energy? Beginning with this question, we have designed a new course for second-year engineering students. Drawing on the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our diverse team of engineering instructors, we aimed to provide an introduction to energy for all engineering students that challenged the dominant discourse in engineering by valuing students’ lived experiences and bringing in examples situated in different cultural contexts. An Integrated Approach to Energy was offered for the first time in Spring 2020 for 18 students. In this paper, we describe the design of the course including learning objectives, content, and pedagogical approach. We assessed students’ learning using exams and the impact of the overall course using interviews. Students demonstrated achievement of the learning objectives in technical areas. In addition, interviews revealed that they learned about environmental, economic, and social aspects of engineering practice. We intend for this course to serve as a model of engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor by challenging students with scenarios that are technically demanding and require critical thinking about contextual implications.

An Introductory Energy Course to Promote Broad Energy Education for Undergraduate Engineering Students

“…Student learning outcomes were also evaluated with items selected from course assessment materials, including student exams and debate project deliverables, as well as a pre/post quantitative questionnaire that included a series of both knowledge-based and attitudinal questions administered in 2020 and 2021. The questionnaire contains 19 energy-knowledge questions adapted from a previous questionnaire developed by the authors [58,59] and described more fully in [10]. Topics include energy fundamentals (six questions), electricity generation (four questions), and energy policy (eight questions).…”

“…In addition, the course has modeled effective practices for ESD education, using a systems-based approach and contextualizing technical issues within larger, more complex societal, economic, and environmental challenges [40][41][42]. Like the integrated engineering course presented by Hoople et al [10], this broad energy course is preparing engineering students to tackle complex challenges related to energy and sustainability. These findings indicate that a course such as the one presented here can offer an effective response to the need for improved energy engineering curricula for a sustainable energy future (e.g., [11,22,35]).…”

“…This paper is part of a special issue entitled "Engineering Education for a Sustainable Energy Future". As described in an earlier paper in this special issue, Hoople and co-authors [10] note that engineering students often struggle to find relevance in the energycontent of their engineering courses, which typically focus on basic fundamentals and curricular-specific aspects of energy extraction, conversion, transmission, and distribution, with little connection to the students' lived experiences. Several energy engineering degrees exist at graduate and undergraduate levels (see [11] for a thorough review), yet most of these programs-especially at the undergraduate level-require students to take basic engineering foundation courses while the broader, contextualized energy content is provided in classes taken from across disciplines.…”

An Action Research on the Long-Term Implementation of an Engineering-centered PjBL of Sustainable Energy in a Rural Middle School

“…There is a significant positive correlation among students' attitudes toward problemsolving, knowledge application, thinking skills [16], and even critical thinking and multiple intelligence [17]. This method helps students carry out their practices in groups and links students and their life experiences to help them see engineering as an essential technical work [18]. The use of brainstorming during a group's cooperative learning leads to various subjects being intertwined [19].…”

An Action Research on the Long-Term Implementation of an Engineering-Centered PjBL of Sustainable Energy in a Rural Middle School

“…There is a significant positive correlation among students' attitudes toward problemsolving, knowledge application, thinking skills [16], and even critical thinking and multiple intelligence [17]. This method helps students carry out their practices in groups and links students and their life experiences to help them see engineering as an essential technical work [18]. The use of brainstorming during a group's cooperative learning leads to various subjects being intertwined [19].…”