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Innovative courses within the College utilize experiential learning to meet unique education goals

Justin Wang

Learning is typically associated with a classroom and a chalkboard, but it doesn’t have to be. In CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, innovative faculty are experimenting with new methods outside the classroom to facilitate learning. Students are, for example, visiting manufacturing sites; they are also experiencing what it’s like to be astronauts on the surface of Mars. The College is currently offering a number of exciting new classes that are pioneering novel approaches to education.

Manufacturing Processes and Systems 

MCEN 4026: Manufacturing Processes and Systems is a core Mechanical Engineering course, but received an upgrade in Fall 2019 when Mechanical Engineering Professor, Janet Tsai, started teaching the class. In Fall 2018, when she learned she would be teaching the class, Professor Tsai led a brainstorming session with industry partners to determine what important things they thought students should learn, whether they would consider being guest speakers for the class, and whether students could tour their sites.

The class is designed to intentionally bridge the gap between education and application within the engineering workplace. Professor Tsai said, “School is meant to teach you what to think about and how to work through the process, but there is always more on-the-job training in industry. A lot of the industry folks see that gap and want to help bridge it by offering tours or coming in to speak so that they can directly talk to students.”

The course offers about 10 industry tours per semester. Students must attend one of the tours organized by Tsai, five virtual tours, and they must organize and attend one tour independently. Industry sites for this course have included Front Range Engineering, Carestream Health, Colorado Spice Factory, Ball Corporation, and Terumo BCT. 

“We’re really used to the school environment, [but] there is so much to learn about going to observe a new environment. It’s important for our students as engineers to start understanding this,” Professor Tsai said. “Manufacturing is a topic that takes all of your senses. A tour is a great example of that because it’s not only what you’re hearing from the tour guide. It’s what you’re seeing, what you’re smelling, and what you’re hearing from the machines in the background. It’s a very visceral field that we don’t talk about that much in engineering, but it’s fun to have this total sense experience.” 

Professor Tsai emphasizes the importance of understanding the fundamentals of manufacturing, because they govern the process from which all products emerge.  “We hope in engineering that after a student takes our course, they see something in the world a little differently, and I think manufacturing is even more applied” Professor Tsai said. “Any given product should make you think about little details. You can uncover a lot about a product’s history by taking it apart and looking at it. To see that is a powerful tool students are learning as engineers, and it’s a skill that can inform their thinking for the rest of their lives.” 

Unfortunately due to COVID-19, in-person site tours were canceled after restrictions were put in place. Moving forward, however, Professor Tsai will continue to teach this course and offer industry tours.  In the Fall of 2020, she will be co-teaching the course with Dave Wolenski ‘83, who is the owner and president of Electro-Mechanical Products, Inc.

Medicine in Space and Surface Environments 

ASEN 4519/5519 Medicine in Space and Surface Environments is a course that combines the efforts of CU ��«����Ƶ’s Aerospace Engineering department and the CU Anschutz School of Medicine to teach students about the general medical and operational challenges of sending people on long-duration exploration missions, and about the particulars of sending people to Mars. The class is taught by Aerospace Engineering Professor Allison Anderson, Dr. Ben Easter from CU Anschutz as well as a number of other professionals. 

“We bring together instructors from the Anschutz medical campus, NASA flight surgeons and emergency medicine doctors from around the world to come teach students about the basics of medical care in remote, austere environments as would be encountered on Mars,” said Professor Anderson. “We couple that with the engineering challenges, the operational challenges, and the medical events that we can’t even anticipate now. Because of the duration and the extreme nature of these missions, it’s highly likely that we’re going to encounter medical events that we haven’t encountered before.”

The class consists of weekly three-hour long lectures for the first few months of the semester where students obtain their CPR and Wilderness First Aid training. Then, over Spring Break, students travel to Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, Utah for the field component of the class where they live out a Mars simulation consisting of practicing medical scenarios as astronauts. Students also practice work as mission controllers and launch a rocket consisting of a payload designed by the graduate student team. 

“The out-of-classroom and field environment is by far the most important portion for this class,” Professor Anderson said. “Seeing students transition from day one in the field to day six in the field was astounding. Just to see how incredibly proficient and how well that active component solidified the learning goals and seeing them think and reason and work in a team in real-time was incredible.” 

Each student had to apply for individual admission to this course. Professor Anderson said students were specifically selected for this class from a broad range of backgrounds because they were interested in the intersection between aerospace engineering and medicine. “Having this on-the-field exposure for the students teaches them about the direct challenges presented in this environment,” she added. “This is meant to be ingraining and meaningful so that when they go into their perspective fields in say design, mission control, or as a medical doctor, they understand what’s going to be on the other side of their work. They understand what those astronauts need to know, how they need to know it, and how they can be effective in the job even if they don’t have their own boots on the ground.” 

Experiential learning is a common education tool in medicine, but it is not frequently employed in engineering courses. This is part of what makes the class so desirable. 

Professor Anderson added that “A lot of people want to take this class because ‘it’s fun’, and it surely is! But the strongest component of this class, I believe, is that students not only learn this information but they also contextualize it so differently in a very impactful manner,” she said. “Because we get students outside the classroom into this immersive environment, the end result is really strong.”

Unfortunately due to COVID-19, the trip to Mars Desert Research Station was canceled this year. Nevertheless, Dr. Anderson plans on providing this course annually for students because of its high demand. Barring any complications, next year’s class will include the field component in Utah. 

 When asked about his experience in the class, Graduate Student Michael Zero, who took the course when it was first offered as a Maymester class in 2019, said:  “Many of the students in the class want to be astronauts, but realistically none of us will be. Going into that environment and going through these experiences and contributing to what an EVA (extravehicular activity) would be like on Mars was really cool. I was fulfilling a childhood dream.”

Don Quixote’s Virtual Worlds 

HUEN 3843 Don Quixote’s Virtual Worlds, taught by Herbst Program of Engineering, Ethics & Society professor Diane Sieber, is a “Global Intensive” course for students in the Global Engineering RAP and Engineering Honors RAP, but will soon be open to all students in the College.

“Global Intensive courses were launched two years ago by a few faculty members. It involves doing two hours of a threecredit class here during the Fall or Spring semester and then doing the third hour as a trip abroad consolidating everything students have learned,” Professor Sieber said. For this Global Intensive, students visit Spain for almost two weeks.

“In this course, we are looking at the context and literature of history and politics. What it means for an empire to decline. What it means to read stories and to be read by others. What it means to live so entirely in fiction that you lose sight of what is real. And also the really positive ways in which fiction can affect you and help you make better choices” Professor Sieber said. 

During the semester, students read Don Quixote and keep journals to take note of the passages that stood out to them. Then in Spain students travel around the country visiting towns such as Segovia, Toledo and Madrid to see places mentioned in the book in person as well as better understand the history and politics surrounding Don Quixote. 

“We easily lose sight of how human history has been a part of engineering,” she said.  “In modern Madrid, there is this layering of modern skyscrapers, Arab walls, Roman stones and roads… Madrid is this modern world built on top of an extensive former empire in this important place in time. In a sense it’s a type of time travel trip.”

Sieber also noted that in Madrid, which is her hometown, she knows more than the average tour guide; she leads students into unknown places like basement bars where they can find “secret entries into the Arab sewer and irrigation tunnels.” Her knowledge of what the city looked like when Cervantes lived there makes it possible to explore Madrid “through Cervantes’ point of view, too.” 

Professor Sieber added, “I think the most important thing for students to see is the layering of different time periods and the simultaneity of being aware of your past and your future. We don’t have a classroom in Spain, the city is truly our classroom. I designed the class so we allow some free time to explore in Spain. For some, this is the first time students are traveling out of the country!” 

Mary Rahjes, a master’s student in Mechanical Engineering, took this course when it was first offered in May 2018. Traveling to Spain for this course was Rahjes’ first time out of the country. “Going abroad for the first time with a group of my peers who I knew and felt comfortable with helped alleviate the anxiety of going to a new country where I didn’t even speak the language,” Rahjes said. 

“I think it’s important,” Professor Sieber added, “for people to go abroad and figure out who you are by saying ‘What else is out there?’” 

Due to COVID-19, the trip to Spain this May was canceled. Nevertheless, Professor Sieber plans on offering more Global Intensive courses in the future both in Spain and in other parts of our world. 

“I’m looking forward to lots of faculty in the College of Engineering finding ways in which they can reinforce everything they’re doing in their classes by going somewhere and seeing it in practice,” Professor Sieber said. “I think in terms of what students remember from a class—yeah you remember it some—but the thing you actually lived, manipulated, stood inside and interacted with in a real place ... those are the things you will remember for a lifetime and I think that’s a really valuable part of what engineering is.”

Residential Design-Build 

AREN 4830: Residential Design-Build I and II started after the Summer of 2017 when Architectural Engineering students Hannah Blake and Gabi Abello attended the Solar Decathlon challenge in Denver, Colorado. This competition, sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), invites competitors from multiple universities to innovate solutions to real problems in the building industry by designing and building functional homes. After attending the event, Blake and Abello reached out to faculty at CU ��«����Ƶ to find a mentor for the team. Instructor Jennifer Scheib volunteered, together with Graduate Student Brenton Kreiger, who competed at the 2017 Solar Decathlon challenge with UC Berkeley, and they created CU ��«����Ƶ’s Solar Decathlon team.

Their goal as a team, according to the CU Solar decathlon website, is to “address the housing attainability crisis and construction challenges faced by mountain towns across the country,” by designing a net-zero “SPARC” house, which incorporates five essential design pillars:  “Sustainability, Performance, Attainability, Resiliency, and Community.”

Abello said, “One of the biggest challenges in these mountain towns is that seasonal workers and service workers are getting pushed out because real estate costs are going up due to their popularity as vacation destinations. The house we are designing has an attached unit to allow the family to rent out the unit at a lower cost and to provide the family with some income.” 

An initial challenge for the team was to find students willing to devote a lot of time and hard work to the project. The team was tasked, not only with the design of a readyto-build home, but also with learning all the coinciding technicalities associated with the design process. The way to accomplish these things and overcome their challenge, the team decided, was to  design a class that would help the team acquire necessary skills and knowledge, and also solve the problem of trying to get students to devote time and energy to the project by offering students credit and folding the project into their course schedule. 

The class started last Fall with lectures, structured readings and homework. Last semester the class focused on design and the homework tied into the project deliverables. “We learned a lot on system and architectural design,” Blake said. “Each week we would have a lecture on a construction or technological topic such as, ‘What is the perfect wall for differing climates?’ These were meant to teach and inform us of these different topics and then we would use what we learned to inform our design for the competition.”

“It’s an unmatched experience for students to design and build a house based on real market conditions and real constructive challenges,” Blake said. “This is real life with real money and a real house that real people are going to live in. Our work for this class is not like any other homework assignment. You can’t just ‘get by’ doing something like this, there are real and high stakes here, which is what has made this course such an amazing experience as well.” 

During the Spring 2020 semester, the class has been focused on the construction of the house in a large indoor factory owned and operated by Simple Homes, a start up in Denver that specializes in modular, panelized construction. Weekly over the semester, for every one hour the students spend in lecture, they spend eight hours in construction. 

Abello said that taking the class and participating in the competition has taught the team a great deal about industry and forging professional relationships.  She added that it also taught her about leading, collaboration and working, and that the course ultimately influenced her choice of career. 

Instructor Scheib said that her work with the class and competition was the most challenging and rewarding project she has been a part of at CU. “It is challenging because the project is too big for me to support all parts and so students truly have to find their own solutions, mentors and boundaries for participating. [But] it is rewarding because the students who choose to participate are passionate and hard working. It is such a privilege to work with this group, mentor them where I can, and learn from them.”

The original plan was for the home to be assembled and put on display on East Campus May 12 for adjudication and to then be open to the public the last two weeks of May. Unfortunately due to COVID-19, construction of the house has been delayed and many changes to this project are actively being made at the time of this writing. Check in at www.cubouldersolardecathlon. com/ for updates. 

Tentatively, students are expected to visit Washington D.C. in the first two weeks of July to present their project and pitch its market potential for the final component of this challenge.