(263b) Co-Developing a Hands-on, Project-Based, First-Year Che Course

Among programs surveyed in the US and Canada, 80% of students who obtain chemical engineering (CHE) degrees have declared it their major (formally or informally) at the start of their first semester[1]. For these first-year students, nearly all experience an introduction to engineering or introduction to discipline course, with approximately 60-70% of such courses including ‘projects’ as one of the many varieties of classroom activities[1]. This paper aims to describe the inspiration, motivation, and framework used to build a hands-on, project-based, first-year introduction to chemical engineering course, co-developed by various faculty in our department. We will highlight the projects themselves, each which supports one of the four course modules: Chemical Engineering vs Chemistry, Design-Build-Test, Process Control, Exploring CHE. We will summarize our experiences teaching this course over two academic years, and observed impacts it has had on our students. We will discuss ways the course could be modified to meet needs of other programs, including scaled for larger student cohorts. A study is currently being conducted on the impacts that this course has CHE students' sense of belonging to their major.

[1] L. P. Ford, others, "How We Teach: Chemical Engineering in the First Year," in American Society for Engineering Education Virtual Conference, 2020.