Engaging Spaces For First Year Engineering: A Tale Of Two Classrooms

Engaging students in learning through the use of active and cooperative approaches has been recognized as an effective way to improve their educational experience. These approaches are particularly important in the first year where student engagement is an important factor in students success and retention. Engineering education has used these approaches in laboratories, problem sets and projects outside the classroom. The need is to use them more inside the classroom. In spite of this recognition and many faculty who do use these approaches in class, most university learning spaces are designed to be optimized for straight lecture. Active and cooperative processes can be brought into any space but why not design the space with them in mind? Learning spaces of a different design send a message to both faculty and students that a different approach to learning is expected. Two classrooms were redesigned to easily accommodate active and cooperative approaches in first-year classes. The first room was a computer classroom. It was previously arranged in a traditional configuration where each student had a computer arranged in rows facing the front of the classroom. This space was rearranged to a workshop configuration, where the rows were turned perpendicular to the front. This allows for easier interaction between students and faculty and allows the faculty to easily scan the majority of student computer screens. A second classroom received a more extensive renovation. It was adapted to accommodate students working in groups on a wide range of activities including discussion, computer work, laboratories, and lecture. This multimodal classroom space is designed around four service clusters that each includes two computers, electrical power, air and water supplies. Each cluster accommodates six students that can be easily broken into groups of two, three or six students. These are both modest sized spaces with capacities of 24 and 28 respectively. However, the space concepts used can easily be applied to larger classrooms. These spaces were assessed using a behavioral instrument (the Student Classroom Engagement Questionnaire), student comparisons to other facilities, and faculty observations. Active and cooperative learning approaches can be carried out in any learning space. However, learning spaces can be designed to facilitate and encourage these activities. Students report greater interaction with each other and with faculty in these specially designed spaces relative to other learning spaces they use. The Multimodal Classroom allowed the implementation of a new project in one course that increased student time on group tasks in the classroom and significant use of the room outside of class.