The nature of engineering design thinking needs to change drastically to address the climate crisis, as the technologies and activities that damage the environment are generated by engineering design. Current engineering design practices, as well as engineering design education (EE) pedagogies, are driven by formal knowledge structures, such as…

In this paper, we have combined a pragmatic and a sociocultural perspective on how artifacts are used in technical problem-solving. With these perspectives we explore how three mechanical engineering students build a plastic spider together, using instructions they found on the internet. Ten hours of video recordings were selected for a detailed…

Green engineering is an important direction for engineering education, especially in the field of chemical engineering, where green chemical is a necessary guarantee for achieving sustainable development in the industry. How to practice the principles of green engineering in curriculum education is a problem that needs to be faced in engineering…

The semiconductor industry offers ample employment opportunities for chemical engineers. The CHIPS Act prioritizes workforce training as a key contributor to the success and growth of semiconductor manufacturing. UF ChE teaches semiconductor processing lab modules to both undergraduate and graduate students. At the graduate level UF ChE offers…

Most core process control courses teach skills little used in industrial practice. In contrast, learning how process objectives translate to control objectives in the form of continuous feedback controls, continuous and discrete logic, and sequential logic for batch operations is more relevant to practicing chemical engineers. These design and…

An elective course on chemical process separations has been developed to provide upper-level undergraduate students the opportunity to develop expertise in evaluating and potentially improving energy consumption in distillation operations. This paper presents examples of the work submitted to illustrate the pedagogy of the class. These examples…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

Background: Engineers are socialized to value rational approaches to problem solving. A lack of awareness of how engineers use different decision-making approaches is problematic because it perpetuates the ongoing development of inequitable engineering designs and contributes to a lack of inclusion in the field. Although researchers have explored…

Due to its positive results, active learning has spread to most areas of knowledge of Civil Engineering. Many of these studies used only one technique, which is limiting given the diverse learning styles that the students may have. The road geometric design is the area that has been the least explored in Civil engineering. Therefore, the objective…

This study explores the relationship between collaborative dynamics, expressed through observed leadership behaviour, and skills. It is based on the mechanical design activity of six dyads of students (post-secondary vocational training), composed of 11 boys and one girl, who are improving an existing mechanical system. Actions are studied using…

Background: Understanding the nature of engineering is important for shaping engineering education, especially precollege education. While much research has established the pedagogical benefits of teaching engineering in kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12), the philosophical foundations of engineering remain under-examined. Purpose: This…

Civil engineers and project managers must control and manage the project management discourse with the client and other stakeholders or risk slippages to time, cost, and programs. This paper explores how communicative choices and the representation of project requirements and engineering issues are intrinsic to effective civil engineering work.…

This paper regards the mechanical curriculum teaching as a design problem and uses environment-based design (EBD) method to solve it. First, environment components and their relations of the mechanical curriculum are found out by recursive object model (ROM). Then, conflicts in the teaching process are identified by analysing the above relations.…

Simplifying equations via assumptions is integral to the "engineering method." Algebraic scaling helps in teaching the engineering skill of making good assumptions. Algebraic scaling is more than a pedagogical tool. It can create a solution where one was not possible before scaling. Scaling helps in engineering proper design…

There are myriad understandings of design that have evolved over time and vary by the industries and disciplines that practice it. In the engineering context, design is often described as a process or problem-solving ability. Through interviews with 12 experienced engineers, it was found that there are diverse understandings of the relationship…