Overcoming the challenge of using the steam tables can be considered a rite of passage in undergraduate thermodynamics courses. Students often circumvent the use of steam tables and resort to simpler digital alternatives to retrieve properties. In fact, the steam tables and their digital relatives that supply numeric property values fail to…

The shift to remote teaching with the COVID-19 pandemic has made delivery of concept-based active learning more challenging, especially in large-enrollment engineering classes. I report here a modification in the Concept Warehouse to support delivery of concept questions. The new feature allows instructors to make students' reasoning visible to…

This paper presents a design project and its assessment in an undergraduate control theory course. In the project, students mathematically modeled the thermal dynamics of a glass incubator and its heat source. Based on these models, they designed a lag compensator to keep the incubator temperature in a safe range when the external temperature…

Thermodynamics is a foundational course in nearly every engineering program. In a traditional classroom, instructors focus on the analysis of thermodynamic energy systems and their application to real world contexts. Because these complex systems can be difficult to understand, some instructors encourage students to tap into their creative side…

Students learn when they connect new information to existing understanding or when they modify existing understanding to accept new information. Most current teaching methods focus on trying to get students to solve problems in a manner identical to that of an expert. This study investigates the effectiveness of assessing student understanding…

The utility of Just-In-Time-Teaching (JITT) is compared across course topics and groups of students not receiving JITT exercises in class. JITT feedback incorporated various active learning exercises based on students' performance on online homework problems from Sapling Learning. With over 200 students in two sections participating in the…

Flipped classrooms support learner-centered approaches to improve conceptualization, comprehension, and problem solving skills by delivering content outside the classroom and actively engaging students inside the classroom. While literature in engineering and science education supports and encourages the use of inverted instruction, many core…

YouTube Fridays devotes a small fraction of class time to student-selected videos related to the course topic, e.g., thermodynamics. The students then write and solve a homework-like problem based on the events in the video. Three recent pilots involving over 300 students have developed a database of videos and questions that reinforce important…

A novel thermal management of electronics course with an associated laboratory has been developed for mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering students. The lecture topics, term project, computer modeling project, and six associated experiments that were built from scratch are described. Over half of the course lectures as well as all lab…

From October 2003 to April 2008 a systemic reform of the Mechanical Engineering program at The City College of New York was undertaken with the goal of incorporating emerging technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), intelligent systems) and new teaching methodologies (such as project based…