Margot Vigeant

Let’s go back into our Chemical Engineering Education time machine once more to 1966. William Mitchell, whose work we have discussed previously [1], had just created yet one more triumph of food product design for General Foods: Cool Whip [2]. This product fits the culinary uses of whipped cream —as a topping or filling for desserts and pastries —while having no lactose, superior shelf and freeze/thaw stability, and (occasionally) a lower price point than whipped cream. This a useful case study for chemical engineering students learning chemical product design. One of the chief responsibilities of chemical engineers is to design processes that safely turn raw materials into finished products through chemical reactions and separations, and to operate, maintain, and improve those processes. A related field that chemical engineers have increasingly joined is chemical product design, wherein a particular product is intentionally designed, often from the micro/molecular/atomic level, to perform one or a variety of functions. Even when our graduates go on to non-product-design positions, it’s helpful for them to have some inkling of how product design works. This is also a good case study for some colloid chemistry, something that usefully shows up in chemical products from paint to pharmaceuticals to sun block to cake mix.

Popcorn is truly remarkable stuff - it’s food that explodes and is still tasty afterwards (as opposed to, say, my adventures in sweetened-condensed-milk-to-dulce-de-leche conversion.) How cool is that? Add to this that it’s relatively rare as an allergen, inexpensive to make, and rapid to prepare and we have everything we need for some great in-class experiments, calculations, and demonstrations (and snacks!) I plan to revisit popcorn in a future article and go farther into the curriculum, but today let’s start at the foundation of our discipline with mass and energy balances.

Contribution: This article provides an examination of changes in first-year engineering students’ perceptions of the role of an engineer after completing the Engineers Without Borders Challenge. Background: Essential pre-and post-comparisons missing in existing studies on the Challenge are provided, as well as comparison to other first-year project types across two universities. Research Question: Do students who participate in service-learning versus traditional project-based learning gain different understandings of the role of an engineer? Methodology: This work implements the questionnaire variant of convergent mixed methods design. A survey containing a mix of Likert-scale, open-ended short answer, and closed card sorting questions was administered to students enrolled in first-year engineering (FYE) courses across two institutions. Limitations of this work include potential bias due to the pre/post survey design and participant course self-selection. Findings: Students’ perceptions of the roles of engineers did not significantly differ by project type. However, changes in their perceptions of technical skills as important to the role of engineers did indicate the beginning of a transition from discipline level thinking to process level thinking. Additionally, course learning objectives influenced students’ perceptions of the role of engineers—with an increase in awareness of the importance of problem solving, communication, design process, and teamwork and a decreasing sense of importance of items missing from course objectives, such as creativity and helping people. Engineers’ professional responsibility to diversity, equity, and inclusion were absent from both the course syllabi and student perceptions of the role of an engineer.

How We Teach: Material and Energy BalancesThe authors present the results of the 2010 AIChE Education Division survey on how chemicalengineering courses are taught. This year’s survey focuses on the undergraduate material andenergy balance course. The survey was conducted of faculty recently teaching the course at theirinstitution during the 2010-2011 academic year in the United States and in Canada. The reportconsists of two parts: the statistical and demographic characterization of the course and itscontent; and the remainder seeks to bring out the most innovative and effective approaches toteaching the course in use by instructors. Additionally, a historical comparison is made betweenthe current survey results and surveys on the same course conducted in 1972 and 1990.

Making their Brains Hurt: Quick and Effective Activities for Thermodynamics Nearly half of the students starting engineering thermodynamics believe that the thermal efficiency of a typical engine is nearly 100% (Vigeant, Prince, and Nottis,2011). This belief is challenging to displace, even for students who demonstrate faculty with mathematical descriptions of efficiency. While traditional lecture is not highly effective at reversing students’ misconceptions, several supporting approaches such as clicker-­‐questions and inquiry-­‐based activities have been demonstrated to be effective in changing students’ minds. In this work, we developed two inquiry-­‐based activities to address each of five areas identified as important yet challenging for students: Entropy, Reversibility, Confusion between Enthalpy and Internal energy, Confusion between Equilibrium and Steady State, and Confusion over factors impacting Chemical Equilibrium and Reaction Rate. The activities each start by setting up a situation where students’ most common misconceptions lead them astray, and ask them to make a prediction. This is followed by a hands-­‐on experiment (when possible) or an interactive simulation (when not) in which students directly interact with the situation that provoked their prediction. These situations are designed so that the predictions based upon the most common misconceptions fail to explain what is observed. Students are allowed and encouraged to “mess with” the experiment to verify that the surprising result isn’t a trick. Finally a series of follow-­‐up and reflection questions encourages students to incorporate the new information into their existing understanding. Each activity is designed to take about 15 minutes and use materials found commonly in chemical engineering laboratories or available at Wal-­‐Mart. These activities have been shown to improve students’ concept inventory scores another 10 percentage points over lecture alone. In the following paper, we will present a summary of each activity and its implementation, as well as further evidence for the effectiveness of the approach.

Food and related commercial and consumer products are a significant industrial sector, regularly accounting for the employment of 15-­‐20% of our graduating class. Inspired by this and an interest in food and food science among faculty and students in general, we developed a course in Applied Food Science and Engineering, taught for the first time in Fall 2011 and then again in Fall 2012. The course is a four-­‐credit upper level elective, taught in a problem-­‐based format. Class time is scheduled as two two-­‐hour blocks to allow integration of class and lab in a flexible manner. Course objectives include students’ attaining a level of familiarity with molecular scale cooking and preservation processes as well as with the large-­‐scale unit operations used to implement them industrially. Students are also expected to engage with the extensive regulatory, political, and ethical environment surrounding food production and policy. The five problems on which the course is based span key elements of food chemistry such as reduction, emulsification, crystallization, pasteurization, and fermentation. The course concludes with a final “free-­‐ choice” project where students propose a new product not currently available in stores, and also a just for fun ‘Iron Chef’-­‐style competition. Student work demonstrates that the course objectives are being achieved.