Strengthening Sustainable Design Principles in the Civil Engineering Curriculum

Sustainable design principles are starting to become part of professional engineering designs. To prepare students to be competitive in the workplace, it is prudent that undergraduate programs incorporate sustainable design principles throughout curricula. It was the vision of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CE) Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology to weave sustainable design principles throughout our civil engineering undergraduate curriculum, with the expectation that the civil engineering students incorporate sustainable design principles in a more thoughtful and logical manner in their civil engineering projects. The CE Department has previously reported the incorporation of sustainable design principles from freshman to senior years and its impact on our students’ understanding of sustainability. However, we found that many students still struggled to incorporate social sustainability in their capstone project designs. In response, we created and implemented a community engagement engineering module for our Codes and Regulations course. The module consisted of analyzing case studies and finally applying sustainable design principles, with particular emphasis on social sustainability, to capstone projects. We used preand post-course surveys to assess if the community engagement engineering module impacted students’ learning. Additionally, we assessed preliminary senior design project reports from a social sustainability perspective, comparing reports from the intervention cohort with the three previous cohorts.