(263c) Student Perspectives on Experiential Learning in a Fluid Mechanics Course

Chemical engineering core courses are the foundation upon which all student research, internships, co-ops, and future careers depend. The core classes are often in between a student first coming to college, excited to be an engineer and build and create, and students taking their first engineering lab classes or getting opportunities to apply the core courses outside of the lecture hall. This time in between, when students have to absorb an enormous amount of critical information often without physically seeing any of phenomena being discussed, can be discouraging to students and impact their desire and ability to persist in engineering. Experiential learning is one of the high impact practices known to help students stay engaged with course material, improve their self-identity, and better internalize the concepts being taught. Incorporating experiential learning into core courses can be challenging, however, since the student population in these classes can be large, the classes are traditionally in a lecture format which can be difficult for the instructor to alter (particularly in a resource scarce environment), and core courses have a large amount of material to cover. This work will focus on the incorporation of three hands-on lab modules into a fluid mechanics course and the student perceptions of these experiences. The three lab modules focused on topics that had challenged students in previous semesters: manometers, rigid body motion, and turbulent/laminar flow. We will discuss the implementation of each lab module and student feedback as it relates to how the experiences contributed to their understanding of the material and how valuable the students felt the experiences were to the course overall. The findings suggest a new way of approaching student buy-in for experiential learning in their classes and a path forward for incorporating experiential learning in chemical engineering classes.