Unit Operations Lab Bazaar: Incorporation of Laboratory Experiences in Six Integrated Pillar Courses

The NSF-funded “Pillars of Chemical Engineering” program was implemented in 2003 at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, with the traditional undergraduate courses in chemical engineering restructured into six Pillar or core courses. 1 The purpose was to develop a completely integrated chemical engineering curriculum with one of the six Pillar courses taught each semester, beginning in the fall of the sophomore year. The Pillars are designed to introduce students to engineering fundamentals in mass and energy balances, thermodynamics, kinetics, transport phenomena, process control, and design while providing an accompanying laboratory experience for each Pillar. These six Pillar courses take advantage of block scheduling with each course taught five days per week in two hour sessions – three days for lecture, one day for problem recitation, and one day for an associated laboratory course over a fifteen week semester. The ability to provide an accompanying laboratory experience for each course, which is often not possible in a traditional curriculum, is a major advantage in the Pillar curriculum. In each laboratory course, students work in teams and each team performs two experiments per semester. While the primary objective of the accompanying laboratory experiences is to reinforce the student’s understanding of the lecture material with hands-on application, the laboratory courses are structured to develop and test student’s abilities to organize, work within teams, develop experimental capabilities, analyze data, and follow through on technical projects with a concentrated effort on practicing communication skills – both written and oral. Hence, an additional major advantage of the Pillar format is it permits the implementation, starting in the sophomore year, of structured laboratory experiences involving a total of twelve different experiments throughout the undergraduate studies. This structure enables repeated reinforcement which enhances their theoretical understanding of the material and provides for longer term development of the student’s teaming, technical, experimental, and communication skills. This paper discusses the required logistics that have been developed to handle laboratory courses that accompany our Pillar courses and their advantages, as well as potential disadvantages. It presents a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of this approach based upon a 5-point Likert scale student survey.