(552b) Seeing Is Learning: Showing First-Year Undergraduate Students a Preview of Senior-Level Chemical Engineering Experiments

To get their child interested in the science of baseball, a parent would likely take them to the ballpark to watch a game first or play catch with them on the playground before teaching them the dynamics of the motion of spherical objects through the air. Once the child has taken to the game, they would be a lot more motivated to learn the theory behind various aspects of the game. It is this rather intuitive sequence that we are attempting to institute with incoming chemical engineering undergraduate students at Kansas State University.

As part of the study, students in the first or second semester of their chemical engineering program will be invited to participate in a demonstration of selected experiments from the unit operations laboratory that they would be doing down the line in their senior year. Emphasis will be on observation rather than the theory behind the experiments, with students getting the opportunity to see start-up, steady-state operation, and shutdown of different pieces of equipment. The exercise is meant to be informal, where students can ask questions, take notes and record videos for posterity. Participation in the exercise will be made optional and left to the individual students. The demonstrations will be restricted to groups of no more than 6 students, with the total time commitment for each student being 2 hours at most. There will be no accompanying test or assignment; students will simply be asked to give feedback about the experience on an anonymous survey. Finally, each participating student will be given one credit for the assembly course (ChE 015). For context, every chemical engineering undergraduate student must have at least 24 assembly credits before graduation.

Response rate of students to the exercise along with feedback from the attending students will be analyzed and presented at the conference. Data collected in the study, in conjunction with the comments and suggestions from members of the chemical engineering education community will be used in the implementation of such laboratory demonstrations in a more structured and mandatory manner as part of the freshman course on current topics in chemical engineering (ChE 110) at Kansas State University.