Proactive Means for Engineering Students' Edification on Sustainability

A vigorous role of engineers is to uphold and advocate sustainability, yet, this role is often overlooked especially in regions where the guidelines of sustainability are enforced but not trusted. The problem seems to resonate on the motives not the practice, hence, it is very important to quantify sustainability and show measurable merits that encourage professionals to adhere to sustainability. Textbook pedagogy succeeds in explaining the procedure but failed to provoke the student’s interest, therefore, a new methodology is needed to teach sustainability to freshmen engineering students by means of interactive and collaborative approaches. The core goal of this work is to engage the students’ skills and enhance their social, environmental and economic confidence to generate solutions that are both sustainable and humane. One of the objectives is to expose the students to engineering tools such as CAD, MATLAB, NN and other cutting-edge tools. Also, it is important to enhance the student’s research skills and improve their communication skills such as report writing and presentations. The proposed study suggests employing computer aided engineering and multi-paradigm numerical computing tools that provide suitable means to generate multiple scenarios with diverse parameters then propose and test possible solutions. Such tools allow for CAD simulations of multiple product that impose high impacts when recycled and are also perceived as high demand items. The tools also provide data structures, probability analyses and graphical presentations of the findings. The students then probe different theories which enhance sustainable practices that reduce resources exploitations then propose solutions that can be modeled and tested.