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A survey of United States chemical engineering curricula shows that a relatively small number of departments offer their first-year students a laboratory experience focused on core chemical engineering concepts using hands-on design projects. Furthermore, the first-year chemistry and physics laboratories taken by engineering students do not typically ask them to exercise the type of creativity that attracted students to engineering in the first place. In order to bring more active, collaborative, and hands-on learning into our curriculum, we created a freshman chemical engineering design course and laboratory. This course is situated in the second semester of our curriculum, after a more traditional lecture-based introduction to chemical engineering course, which we have used as a benchmark for our results. In the design laboratory, individual freshmen first use interactive browser-based simulations to familiarize themselves with the relevant theory and data analysis. They are then put into teams, which are given design goals and access to a wide variety of inexpensive materials and tools. Such design goals include, for example, building a process to automatically create homogenous alginate beads for drug deliver, or building a photobioreactor to grow algae effectively. Students then validate their designs and compare their data to that predicted by theory. Students are trained on the use of Arduino microcontrollers and MATLAB to enable them to collect data from a variety of sensors. The course also includes a collaborative assignment on our seniors’ final project, for which our freshmen create resumes and apply. The semester is then capped with a proposal and final project of their own design. We have collected three semesters of results from student surveys, preand post-tests, and detailed usage data from online simulations. The data indicate the pedagogy used in this course has been greatly successfully on multiple fronts. Students report remarkably high levels of satisfaction when compared to control surveys from more traditional lecture-based courses. They indicate that the collaborative methods used have helped them make social connections within the department. Student learning has been demonstrably improved and their skill sets have broadened. The prototyping, teamwork, communication, and data-analysis skills that students have gained early in the curriculum have also greatly increased the value of our freshmen to faculty research programs and others who hire our students as interns.

Results & Lessons Learned from a Chemical Engineering Freshman Design Laboratory