Dr. Ann Saterbak advises a group on their semester-long projects in her course Engineering 120: Introduction to Engineering Design.
From the moment engineers enter the Sallyport to the moment they leave, Dr. Ann Saterbak and Dr. Matthew Wettergreen are instrumental in their development. Rice offers a high caliber engineering education with rigorous courses, research challenges, and the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen where skills learned in the classroom can be applied to innovatively solve problems. This thorough education experience that intertwines theory and research attracts engineering students from near and far. However, freshman must enroll in many math and science prerequisites before they can explore upper level engineering courses. To offer students a foresight of the engineering field as they complete these requirements, Saterbak and Wettergreen have developed Introduction to Engineering Design (ENGI 120). Dr. Wettergreen explains, “Students are looking for authentic experiences, and engineering design classes offer experiences that are the real world.”
Together, Saterbak and Wettergreen have teamed up to develop ENGI 120 as a design-based flipped classroom experience. ENGI 120 offers students an active learning classroom experience. The planning work for this class begins the summer before the academic year when Saterbak and Wettergreen talk with personal acquaintances and professionals in the Houston community about potential project ideas appropriate for first-year students. At the beginning of the semester, students are assigned to teams and given one of these problems to solve over the course of the semester. Originally, the first part of each one and a half hour class was a lecture on a step in the engineering design process followed by team time for groups to work together on their projects. However, Saterbak and Wettergreen discovered that the only way students were applying the lecture material was during the actual project design process. So, as engineers often are, they were innovative and restructured their classroom.
About a year and half ago, Saterbak and Wettergreen hired a production firm with some funding from a National Science Foundation engineering grant. In total, they filmed 32 videos ranging in length from 1-11 minutes that they started using during the fall semester of 2014. This project is still in progress, and they will have five more of their lectures flipped by next fall. Most of their video lectures include bullet points, active examples, and a talking head in the corner of the videos. Saterbak and Wettergreen created the storyboards for all of the videos, but they also had guest speakers such as Dr. Maria Oden and Dr. Marcia O’Malley give lectures on specific topics, too. Last summer, they attended a conference on engineering education where they were able to video four professionals from other universities with different perspectives and areas of expertise. While these videos are specific to Rice’s ENGI 120, Dr. Saterbak says, “Our goal is to create a repository of videos that other universities can use to construct their courses, too.”
Before class, students are assigned to watch these videos. Once they arrive in class, they participate in exercises with their groups, one of which usually relates to their projects directly. They spend about half the class actively learning the concepts from the video lecture. During the second 45 minutes of class, the groups have time to work on their semester-long projects. While completing the projects takes many hours outside of class as well, this gives the freshman automatic group meetings twice every week when Saterbak and Wettergreen are there to offer advice and suggestions. Some examples of projects that freshmen students have completed include a bike rack for METRO buses in Houston, protective homes for baby birds for the Houston Zoo, and an enrichment device for swamp monkeys for the Houston Zoo.
Part of the purpose in offering design experiences early on in Rice careers is that it prepares students to work in teams and collaborate on solving problems. By graduation, Rice engineers know how to communicate within a team, how to divide labor amongst a group, and how to brainstorm collaboratively, which prepares them to work in engineering firms, as consultants, or in many other careers. While Rice engineers gather these tools from upper level experiences such as the required senior engineering design projects, Saterbak and Wettergreen realized that the earlier students develop these skills, the more prepared they will be. Thus, ENGI 120 was born. Their first cohort of 80 ENGI 120 students are graduating this year, and Saterbak and Wettergreen do think that these students were better prepared going into senior design as a result of starting their preparation for collaborative work early on in college.
Students discuss their ENGI 120 project in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.
According to Saterbak and Wettergreen, “ENGI 120 tricks students into learning by giving them a real world project with intense collaboration, professional writing, kinesthetic learning, and an external client that offers them applied instead of theoretical learning.” Overall, students give positive feedback, and students who like their teams especially enjoy the class. Clearly, students notice and appreciate the dedication of these two professors because the junior and senior classes recently honored Saterbak with the Nicolas Salgo Distinguished Teacher Award for 2015. Saterbak and Wettergreen help students understand how to collaborate, how to problem-solve, and how to communicate their ideas, which, from their first year at Rice, equips Rice engineering students with tools to help them flourish throughout their student and professional careers.