Work in progress: Student outcomes of design projects across the curriculum

Abstract

This addresses the question, "To what degree can design projects integrated into the Chemical and BiomolecularEngineering (ChBE) curriculum affect student confidence in their design skills and perceptions of ChBE as a whole?" To answer this question, students were evaluated on their confidence with engineering design and their satisfaction with ChBE as a discipline before and after the design projects, as well as their perceived learning outcomes after completing the design projects.

Design Challenges as a Spine to Engineering Courses

“…Faculty, graduate students, and dozens of chemical engineering students have developed, implemented, and refined these design challenges which stretch through the core curriculum from the first year to some graduate-level electives courses. Our goal with implementing these varied design challenges is to allow a diverse set of students the opportunity to see the numerous applications of chemical engineering to local and globally-relevant problems [1], and to help them develop the engineering skills and confidence which will empower them to solve these problems [2][3][4][5][6][7]. This paper presents the structure, sequence, and requirements of these team-based design projects as they form a spine across required chemical engineering courses.…”