Seattle, Washington
June 14, 2015
June 14, 2015
June 17, 2015
978-0-692-50180-1
2153-5965
Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division – Design and Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation
15
26.1346.1 - 26.1346.15
10.18260/p.24683
https://strategy.asee.org/24683
544
Andrew Tadd earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2006. After graduation, he remained at the University as a Postdoctoral Fellow, continuing research work on catalysts for hydrocarbon reforming and hydrogen production. In November of 2007 he officially joined the Department of Chemical Engineering’s staff when he was appointed as an Assistant Research Scientist. He holds a M.S. in Chemical Engineering (2001) from the University of Toledo and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University (1997). Prior to entering graduate school in 1999, he worked as a Project Engineer and a Process Engineer for Pilkington, Inc. in Ohio and Michigan. Throughout graduate school and beyond his research has focused on catalysis. He has extensive experience preparing, testing, and characterizing heterogeneous catalysts in addition to experience with supercritical fluids. Dr. Tadd has authored and coauthored 18 papers and presentations in catalysis and catalysis integration, and holds a patent for a control methodology for hydrocarbon reforming reactors.
Concurrently with his appointment as an Assistant Research Scientist, Dr. Tadd began teaching part time in the Chemical Engineering Department. He has taught the junior heat and mass transfer laboratory course, ChE 360, and the senior-level process design and simulation course, ChE 487. Dr. Tadd officially joined the Chemical Engineering faculty as a full-time lecturer in Fall 2013, teaching the process design course senior design and the junior year separations course, ChE 343. Most recently, Dr. Tadd has been developing an elective course on statistics and applications to industrial quality, including an overview of SPC, Six Sigma terminology and techniques, and basic design of experiments.
Elaine Wisniewski teaches technical communication courses in the Chemical Engineering and Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) departments. She has degrees in IOE and Technical Communication from the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University, respectively, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. She has 12+ years of industry experience in human factors and safety engineering.
Leena Lalwani is an Engineering librarian and the Coordinator for Engineering Collection at the Art, Architecture and Engineering Library (AAEL) at the University of Michigan. She is also the liaison Librarian for Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering and Entrepreneurship. Leena has been a librarian at University of Michigan since 1995 in various ranks. Prior to joining University of Michigan, Leena has worked as Librarian at Gelman Sciences and American Tobacco Company. Leena has a M.L.S. degree from Catholic University of America and M.S. in Chemistry from the University of Mumbai.
Revitalizing the Chemical Engineering Senior Design Experience: Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and a Flipped Classroom Experience Graduates in chemical engineering pursue a wide variety of careers and, in today’s business environment, technical proficiency is required but no longer sufficient to ensure success. Welldeveloped problem solving skills and the ability to describe, convey, and sell those solutions to upper management is a must. The pace of business has also increased – higher productivity, shorter design turns, and global competition mean that successful engineers must be selfstarters, seek out opportunities for improvements, and have an entrepreneurial mindset. Our current capstone design experience, fails to fully prepare our graduates for these challenges. Currently, the course focuses on technical design skills, with light coverage of actual problem solving and design strategies or heuristics. As the first truly comprehensive chemical engineering course, the current content is a blend of a review of principles and some concepts of integration of skills. It is still delivered in a lecturedriven, teachercentered format, and the communications component is heavily reliant on rather lengthy written reports. Our student teams do benefit from being mentored by program alumni working in industry, which provides an element of exposure to the real world, but overall the course may be summarized as a bit of creative effort followed by a great deal of computation and technical writing. Therefore, we revitalized the course with the goal to ● focus more heavily on actual problem solving and design skills, ● give students more practice and experience applying these skills with rapid feedback, ● involve the students directly in problem generation and selection, and ● shift the communications focus towards concise, businessoriented written and oral reporting. This redesign aimed to give students more input into the projects they work on and more empowerment in their own learning, and provide an opportunity for dedicating significant classroom time to active learning and peertopeer evaluation. In pursuing these overall goals, we also developed better tools for differentiating individualized student assessment, separate from teambased assessments, and are currently assessing any demonstrable improvement in addressing individual course outcomes as identified by ABET. This paper describes our approach to ● develop the learning modules to deliver technical content to students ondemand, outside the classroom ● create inclass activities to give students practice using creative problemsolving strategies, ● redesign the problem development process to make it studentdriven by engaging and empowering students to define and select a worthwhile problem, and ● develop assessment tools to evaluate the new course design’s impact on student skills, as compared to the traditional approach.
Tadd, A., & Wisniewski, E., & Lalwani, L. N. (2015, June), Revitalizing the Chemical Engineering Senior Design Experience: Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, and a Flipped Classroom Experience Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24683
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