An interactive textbook for a material and energy balances course measured over 1,300 reading interactions and hundreds of auto-graded problems per student each term. Specifically, seven cohorts and 601 students completed over 700,000 reading interactions and 150,000 auto-graded problems. Median reading participation was over 93%. Median correct…

This study explores the effects of a computer algebra system on students' mathematical thinking. Mathematical thinking is identified with mathematical thinking powers and structures. We define mathematical thinking as students' capacity to specialize and generalize their previous knowledge to solve new mathematical problems. The study was…

The current business trends, such as Industry 4.0, require a modern chemical engineer to know about programming, advanced computational tools, and holistic thinking. To this end, an integrated approach, where theoretical concepts are supplemented by computational lab-based exercises and team projects promoting "Design Thinking" is…

Industrial and academic laboratories are undergoing a paradigm shift in process technology from batch to modular flow. Implementation of modular flow processes can enable more efficient operation with superior throughput, scalability, and safety factors owing to superior transport and reaction kinetics. However, both fine chemical and…

Mass transfer separations are of extreme importance to professionals working in the chemical industry. For this reason, chemical engineering and industrial chemistry students are both taught these unit operations at the final years of their study programs. The traditional way of carrying out their design is based on the use of deterministic…

An interactive MATLAB simulation app and design project are described for introducing chemical engineering concepts to engineering freshmen. A MATLAB simulation for pharmaceutical drug dosing is packaged with a graphical user interface in an app that is student friendly. Minimal engineering or coding knowledge is necessary to operate and…

US high school (HS) students are lagging behind their foreign peers in math performance. It is thus necessary to design teaching modules that motivate US HS students to learn more math and to improve their math skills. Our study set out to test two different software programs designed for the development of such skills. MATLAB Simulink provides a…

The importance of distillation in the separation field prompts the inclusion of distillation experiments in the chemical engineering curricula. This work describes the performance of an Oldershaw column in the rectification of a cyclohexane/n-heptane mixture. Total reflux distillation, continuous rectification under partial reflux, and batch…

The Northwestern University Initiative for Teaching Nanosciences (NUITNS) at nanohub.org Web site combines several tools for doing electronic structure calculations and analyzing and displaying the results into a coordinated package. In this article, we describe this package and show how it can be used as part of an upper-level quantum chemistry…

Mobile platforms and cloud computing allow collaborative sharing and submission of work in ways not feasible until recently. In this article, we detail how we took a writing-intensive laboratory and made the submission, reading, grading, and returning of student work online and paper-free, while maintaining familiar elements of pen-and-paper…

Introductions of computer-aided software and simulators are implemented during the sophomore-year of the chemical engineering (ChE) curriculum at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). Our faculty concurs that software integration within the curriculum is beneficial to our students, as evidenced by the positive feedback received from industry…

Inter-group peer evaluation through wikis was implemented as a method for senior capstone design teams to improve writing and the critical evaluation of data. Each group was evaluated by peers using a qualitative discussion and evaluated quantitatively by instructors. Students had an increased interest in contributing to online knowledge centers,…

The instructional design and the corresponding research on student learning of two virtual laboratories that provide an engineering task situated in an industrial context are described. In this problem-based learning environment, data are generated dynamically based on each student team's distinct choices of reactor parameters and measurements.…

Computer programming in undergraduate engineering education all too often begins and ends with the freshman programming course. Improvements in computer technology and curriculum revision have improved this situation, but often at the expense of the students' learning due to the use of commercial "black box" software. This paper describes the…

This paper describes the use of weblabs--web based experiments--for cooperative learning by students working together from two different locations to conduct experiments and write reports.