Results & Lessons Learned from a Chemical Engineering Freshman Design Laboratory

Abstract

Kyle Branch is a second-year graduate student at the University of Utah Department of Chemical Engineering. He has helped develop and teach the described freshman laboratory course. His main research interest is in engineering education, focusing on the creation and analysis of interactive simulations for undergraduate chemical engineering courses.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015 Page 26.1337.1 Results & Lessons Learned from a Chemical EngineeringFreshman Design Laboratory Abstract A survey of United States chemical engineering curricula shows that a relatively small number of departments offer their first-year students a laboratory experience focused on core chemical engineering concepts using hands-on design projects. Furthermore, the first-year chemistry and physics laboratories taken by engineering students do not typically ask them to exercise the type of creativity that attracted students to engineering in the first place.In order to bring more active, collaborative, and hands-on learning into our curriculum, we created a freshman chemical engineering design course and laboratory. This course is situated in the second semester of our curriculum, after a more traditional lecture-based introduction to chemical engineering course, which we have used as a benchmark for our results.In the design laboratory, individual freshmen first use interactive browser-based simulations to familiarize themselves with the relevant theory and data analysis. They are then put into teams, which are given design goals and access to a wide variety of inexpensive materials and tools. Such design goals include, for example, building a process to automatically create homogenous alginate beads for drug deliver, or building a photobioreactor to grow algae effectively. Students then validate their designs and compare their data to that predicted by theory. Students are trained on the use of Arduino microcontrollers and MATLAB to enable them to collect data from a variety of sensors. The course also includes a collaborative assignment on our seniors' final project, for which our freshmen create resumes and apply. The semester is then capped with a proposal and final project of their own design.We have collected three semesters of results from student surveys, pre-and post-tests, and detailed usage data from online simulations. The data indicate the pedagogy used in this course has been greatly successfully on multiple fronts. Students report remarkably high levels of satisfaction when compared to control surveys from more traditional lecture-based courses. They indicate that the collaborative methods used have helped them make social connections within the department. Student learning has been demonstrably improved and their skill sets have broadened. The prototyping, teamwork, communication, and data-analysis skills that students have gained early in the curriculum have also greatly increased the value of our freshmen to faculty research programs and others who hire our students as interns.

A Review of Embedded Systems Education in the Arduino Age: Lessons Learned and Future Directions

“…Arduino has been adopted in many courses that span the engineering curriculum including Introduction to Engineering [18,[28][29][30][31][32][33], Chemistry [34][35], Physics [36][37][38], Electronics [39][40][41], Control and Robotics [19][20][42][43], Fuzzy Logic [44], and DSP [45]. Arduino with its overall simplicity, availability of on-line resources, ease of acquiring parts, and fast prototyping process overcomes many of the difficulties stated in [9].…”

Collaboration between Seniors and Freshmen on Senior Capstone Projects

“…This survey covers just under 100 separate items and the broad results from this work are discussed elsewhere 18,19 . In this work, we have analyzed the correlation between freshmen's perception of their collaborative project experience with the seniors and various other student characteristics.…”

“…During the same semester our freshmen take an introductory chemical engineering design laboratory which has been described in prior work 18,19 . In this course student accomplish five design projects and a final project of their own design.…”

“…The full survey is available in prior published work 19 ; several survey questions pertained directly to this collaborative project that is the focus of this work. Two questions were standard 5-point Likert-style questions asking if the freshmen perceived they "learned important engineering concepts from…" and if they "enjoyed…" the collaborative project.…”

Implementation and Usage of an Online Environment in a Chemical Engineering Curriculum

“…Additionally, there has been no significant difference found in the quality of student retention of scientific concepts between those using online and hands-on learning techniques 2 . In order to cater to as many learning styles as possible, we have developed a freshman design laboratory course, in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah, in which we have coupled traditional, virtual, and hands-on learning techniques, detailed in 3,4 .…”