(237f) Relating “Mass and Energy Balances” Concepts to Everyday Life and Developing Professional Skills

As part of our NSF RIEF project “Developing Professional Identity: Integrating Academic and Workplace Competencies within Engineering Programs”, students are asked to present concepts taught in the “Mass and Energy Balances” course (CHE 210) and relate them to everyday life. Students formed teams of five and were asked to choose a concept and everyday problem from either a proposed list or of their own creation. Upon approval of their topic by the course teaching assistant, they prepared a 5-minute PowerPoint presentation and created a video. During the Fall 2021 semester, students only prepared a PowerPoint presentation and presented it in the class to their peers and two industry mentors who were present. Industry mentors evaluated their presentations and gave them feedback. In the Spring 2022 semester, students presented to the rest of the class and industry mentors and additionally, they created videos. A standardized rubric was used for assessment which includes these elements: understanding of principles that govern daily phenomena, design of the presentation and video, clear explanation of the concept, and delivery of the material. The project team collected evaluation data from mentors. Moreover, qualitative and quantitative data will be collected from students, course instructors, and industry mentors to measure the effectiveness and impact of this implementation on student learning. Once videos are finalized and reviewed by the instructor, a YouTube channel will be created, which can help cultivate engineering identity while also providing a sense of ownership for the UIC CHE community. Our goal is to develop intrapersonal and interpersonal skills in a fun environment while also fostering professional development by direct engagement with the industry. By executing this task, we aim to create an in-situ engineering environment resulting in students’ direct engagement with industry supporting the formation of professional identity. These tasks will help students to identify themselves as engineers as early as sophomore year. Implementation of these tasks in CHE 210 can be a driver of change and transformation of departmental education culture in the future. Moreover, videos posted on YouTube publicly will serve to promote UIC engineering programs. If this intervention is shown to be efficient and impactful, it can be easily scaled to other courses.