DESIGN CHALLENGES OFFER CHEMICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS REAL-WORLD LESSONS

At the University of New Mexico, the chemical and biological engineering department has successfully studded its undergraduate core curriculum with a variety of design challenges that build on one another. The goal: help students better grasp why chemical engineering is a much-needed discipline by having them solve real-world problems on both the local and global level, and give them the chance to develop the skills they’ll need for similar challenges in their careers. In a paper presented at ASEE’s Gulf Southwest Section Conference last April, department members outlined the kinds of design projects the students work on, which incorporate community, industrial, research, or entrepreneurial aspects. The projects begin in students’ freshman year and continue into some graduate-level courses and electives.

In the first-year introductory course, students make presentation pitches, conduct research, write reports, and perform lab work arranged around three projects. One project focuses on remediating water contamination caused by acids draining from abandoned mines, a common problem in New Mexico. Students develop a treatment, prevention, and emergency response protocol for rural communities.

Second-year courses in chemical process calculations and thermodynamics emphasize teamwork and bolstering students’ technical skills, while introducing more theory, optimization research, and decision-making. For instance, in one project lasting seven weeks, teams of students must develop a solution to a widespread global problem using thermodynamics principles. Students submit a technical report with a bibliography, give a final presentation, and receive a group evaluation.

Third-year challenges embedded within transport phenomena and mass transfer courses incorporate more chemical engineering theory and conceptual understanding in developing products and solutions to real-life problems. In one project, student teams work to develop a separations-based consumer product, such as non-alcoholic beer. Students write memos, perform simulations using ASPEN (chemical process simulation software), write a short technical report, and make a sales-pitch video for their product.

Design challenges in 500-level and elective courses build on the experience students gained in previous challenges and ask them to solve a global health problem by developing a product or idea. Students use a maker space for prototyping, 3D printing, welding, woodworking, and laser etching.

The authors conclude that not only are the projects accomplishing their goals, but also “students most of all develop a sense of the breadth of chemical engineering applications and the numerous possibilities for chemical engineering careers.”    

 

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BUILDING A DIGITAL COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS

The pandemic offers an opportunity to try out new tools to bring students together and explore potential benefits for the return of in-person teaching.

By Chris Rogers

Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve learned a lot about how to educate online. As with all good experiments, some results have been surprisingly positive, while others have been … not so. In my own case, I have been working with my students to test out all sorts of different strategies—from online tools to working with Arduino to sending custom electronics kits to 400 homes or dorms. Except for missing the weekly Ultimate Frisbee game, I have been surprised and impressed at how well education is proceeding, with students able to drive their own learning and leverage the new digital tools for help.

Most of my efforts have focused on developing a sense of community and peer assistance among the students, an approach that had paid off in previous in-person environments with student groups becoming self-sufficient, helping each other solve the posed engineering problems. But now, how do you get the same sharing, curiosity, peer support, and idea transfer virtually as when 20 students are working together in a big room?

Like most people, we started with Slack. As a faculty member, I have always preferred this tool to e-mail because there is no spam. While Slack worked fairly well, it became far more powerful when we integrated Google Calendar. Since students are now all over the world, time zone confusion resulted in a few missed meetings and deadlines prior to the calendar alerts. With the integration, students can plan out their day, knowing when they can get help or when they can participate in activities that the “fun committee” dreamt up. While we also integrated other apps such as Zoom and Asana, the calendar was the most transformational addition (with a distant second ensuring everyone put their Zoom address in their profile to make it easier to connect).

A second surprise occurred in our annual summer research program (with about 30 students, all-virtual). We decided to offer a summer seminar series. Instead of the usual 50-minute talks, we opted for five minutes of introduction, 15 minutes of presentation, and 30 minutes of discussion. In their introductions, the speakers talked about their career journeys and what they would want to do differently next time. It was interesting to see the different paths people took to the engineering jobs they currently held (one taught English before becoming an engineer, another Gaelic literature). There were two surprises with the talks: The first was how willing everyone was to Zoom for an hour at lunch, giving us a huge diversity in speakers and topics—from SpaceX launches to issues of racial equity to the beginnings of AI at Google. The second was how popular they were: By the end, the students were requesting three talks a week. With participants’ various interests, the talks supplied content for more online student discussions, forming that community.

Another positive addition was daily update videos. After students complained that they knew nothing about their peers’ projects, we started each morning with a single three-minute movie from one of the groups (each group had to make a movie every other week). These videos worked very well for sharing both ideas and industrial sponsor updates.

To date, my students and I have tried a few dozen different software packages, from Asana to Teams, with mixed reviews. Miro (a digital sticky note board) had the greatest split in votes, with some loving it and others finding it frustrating. Gather, a video-sharing world you can design, showed great potential for enabling the feel of wandering down the hallway and talking with someone but also brought the odd feeling of eavesdropping when you passed different conversations.

The most successful poster session was when we did “the Zoom Dance” for sponsors over the summer. Each industrial sponsor was put in a breakout room and the students migrated from room to room every 10 minutes to show off their work. The sponsors appreciated not having to move for a few reasons: 1) they did not have to be the ones to apologetically leave a discussion, 2) they did not have to worry about where they should go, and 3) they did not have to worry about dealing with any Zoom issues as they moved.

We have tried many other tools: software, portfolios, reflections, and surveys—with variable success—but all helped build a strong community, as students became codesigners. It is exciting to see how learning is changing to better leverage the digital world, and I plan on retaining most of these tools when we are all together again. But I am most excited to bring back the in-person Frisbee games.

 

Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.

TEAMWORK MAKES THE ETHICS WORK

Most classroom discussions of engineering ethics take place with individual students and in the context of disasters. But this method doesn’t reflect real-world scenarios.

By Magdalena G. Grohman, Nicholas Gans, Eun Ah Lee, Marco Tacca, and Matthew J. Brown

Engineers play a critical role in solving complex social and environmental issues. In response, the focus of engineering ethics is shifting from merely preventing harm to also ensuring social responsibility. A new paradigm for students’ engineering education integrates strong technical knowledge with real-world economic, ethical, social, and environmental concerns. Team-based projects and multidisciplinary applications inspire collaboration with classmates. In contrast, engineering ethics education still mostly focuses on decisions by individual engineers and disaster case studies. It does not reflect the type of everyday decisions that practicing engineers must make and neglects the fact that most engineers work on teams. This led us to pose the research question: How are decisions about ethical and social issues made in teams of engineers, rather than by lone individuals?

Focusing on safety, disaster prevention, and intellectual property in engineering ethics curricula leaves little time for discussing social impacts of engineering and technology. Additionally, ethics training comprises a small portion of engineering education. In engineering practice, time pressures and competing training needs are often resolved through division of labor, collaboration, and reliance on experts with complementary expertise. This led us to our second research question: Can having a team member with the specific responsibility for, and special training in, engineering ethics influence or alter the group’s decision-making and, if so, how?

To answer these questions, we launched a three-year ethnographic study of ethical reflection in undergraduate and graduate engineering students. Three groups of students participated in our study: teams of engineering students working on their senior design projects; teams of philosophy of science and technology students trained in facilitating ethics discussions; and members of engineering labs. We observed teams discussing the ethical issues surrounding their projects and collected a variety of ethnographic data. We also observed research labs and facilitated an ethics discussion among their members.

Our results demonstrated that, as teams of engineering students move along the design timeline, their focus shifts from awareness of the multifaceted nature of engineering and professional ethics to concentration on specific technical aspects of their projects. Moreover, our observations suggest that, without the presence of ethics advisers, the explicit understanding of engineering ethics shared by the student teams is rather narrow and limited to technical aspects of the design. For example, some teams declared that designing a safe product is their responsibility, but safe use of the product is users’ responsibility.

Students not only gain explicit understanding of engineering ethics through formal study but also bring to their education a broad range of implicit insights about social responsibility. This implicit understanding could serve as a potential resource for engineering ethics education and ethical practice. Ethics advisers embedded with engineering teams can guide members to see the broader social context or to consider diverse perspectives. This is not because the advisers in our study had some expertise in being ethical, nor were they morally superior individuals. Rather, they had specific training in engineering ethics and, more important, the role responsibility for raising ethical questions about the project. Just as engineering students are not yet fully trained and credentialed engineering experts, the ethics advisers in our study were not ethics experts; still, their interaction provides a valuable model for ethics advising.

We suggest a multistage approach to engineering ethics education. First, students need to be exposed to diverse perspectives regarding ethical and social issues in engineering and need more opportunities to discuss them. Second, students need to have practical learning experiences of ethical decision-making tied to their actual engineering work, not simply reviewing ethical decisions in separate settings focused on extreme cases. Finally, ethics advisers with specific role responsibilities should be involved in collaborative approaches to improve the reasoning of engineering teams in coursework or the lab. Working together, ethics advisers and engineers will surmount complex social and environmental issues.

 

Magdalena G. Grohman is associate director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas, where Matthew J. Brown is the center’s director and Eun Ah Lee is a research associate. Nicholas Gans is division head of automation and intelligent systems at the University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute. Marco Tacca is professor of instruction in electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. This article is adapted from “Engineering Ethics as an Expert-Guided and Socially-Situated Activity” in the October 2020 issue of Advances in Engineering Education.

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HERE’S THE LINEUP FOR NEXT EDITION OF PRISM MAGAZINE:

COVER PACKAGE: THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER 10 YEARS LATER: ENGINEERING A RECOVERY—The reactor remains a heap of toxic rubble, and public opposition has stalled new nuclear plants, but Japan’s nuclear engineering education programs are attracting top talent as the country reaffirms its commitment to abandoning fossil fuels. Prism’s special cover package examines the novel technologies, clean-up efforts, and future directions emerging for Japan’s atomic energy industry 10 years after the devastating tsunami—and includes an exclusive interview with former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the Tokyo Institute of Technology graduate and patent attorney who led Japan during the disaster and now is among its most influential nuclear-power opponents.

 

FEATURE: SPRECHEN SIE ENGINEERING?—Clemson University rolls out a pilot program that combines mechanical engineering and German language courses.

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