(494f) Rig Building: A Fun Hands-on Lab Activity

Student design competitions are a fun and effective experiential learning activity to achieve multiple learning outcomes. Students typically will have the opportunity to practice a range of technical and professional skills as they would need to work in a team to apply concepts and material from the classroom to complete a project that meets a minimum required scope by a defined deadline [1]. The value of design competitions for engineering education is well-known by educators and correspondingly, there are several competitions reported in the literature in various engineering disciplines across different scales (e.g., intra-department [2], inter-university [3], and even international [4]). However, the back-end of developing a student design competition can be complex and is often overlooked in the literature. Here, we describe the development and roll-out of a hands-on competition for first year chemical engineering undergraduates titled “Rig Building”.

Context and Motivation

The MEng in Chemical Engineering program at Imperial College London is a four-year course leading to an integrated master’s degree. In the first year, students take multiple introductory core chemical engineering classes such as transport, separations, and engineering mathematics. Students also complete the Foundation labs, an integrated practical module with a series of structured lab-based activities to help students develop essential skills such as safely manipulating equipment and analyzing experimental data [5]. Rig building was conceptualized as the final activity in the Foundation labs. As the last activity, it was the objective of the teaching staff to provide a fun and memorable experience to students while integrating the subject material covered in lectures and the Foundation labs. As design competitions are often very open-ended, it also helps set the tone for subsequent academic years as the work they will encounter will become increasingly unstructured.

Rig Building

Students are tasked to design and build a closed-system rig where the level and flowrate of water into a tank can be controlled independently. A list of available equipment and hardware for constructing the rigs is provided to students and much of the equipment is recycled year-to-year. Students have multiple constraints and requirements such as a set budget and design specifications that the rig has to achieve. Most constraints are posed as soft constraints where students are increasingly penalized for not meeting them. Students have access to a range of workshop services and expert help, however there is a cost associated with their use which counts towards the budget. The rig building competition lasts a total of one week with students having two days to construct their rig after submitting an initial design and risk assessment. Evaluations take place on the final day.

Assessment and Learning Outcomes

Prior to evaluation which is carried out by teaching staff, students have to compile and submit a series of documentation which includes a P&ID of their rig, a bill of materials and services used, an operating procedure, and an activity risk assessment. During the evaluation, students have to give a five-minute presentation to the assessors outlining the key features of the rig and demonstrate that is can meet the design specifications. Bonus points are awarded for creativity and novelty. Assessors are given a defined rubric to grade students’ rig and deliverables. A small prize is awarded to the team with the best rig.

Historically, students have reported that rig building was the highlight of their Foundation labs experience with students reporting that the experience was fun and that it provided them a hands-on experience with tools and hardware. Many of the comments from course evaluations also indicate that students appreciated the open-ended nature of rig building in contrast to the typical Foundation labs project:

“The rig building was an excellent experience. Perhaps elements of that could be implemented in the actual labs”

“The rig-building project was excellent, as it was very fun and was a great experience to learn how to effectively use tools and equipment, and how to budget and plan well.”

Conclusion

Rig building can be introduced as a fun and engaging small-scale design competition to younger undergraduate chemical engineering students. The project provides students an opportunity to practice multiple technical and professional skills expected from professional engineers and multiple learning outcomes can be explored in a comparatively short amount of time. Operationally, rig building can be implemented comparatively easily. It is also resource efficient as most of the equipment can be recycled year-to-year.

References

[1] C. Kaiser and W. Troxell, “Student Design Competitions in Undergraduate Engineering Education,” in Proceedings Frontiers in Education 35th Annual Conference, 2005, pp. S3J-13-S3J-15, doi: 10.1109/FIE.2005.1612297.

[2] S. Mandavgane, “Fun with fluid: An innovative assignment in fluid mechanics,” Educ. Chem. Eng., vol. 30, pp. 40–48, Jan. 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.ece.2019.11.001.

[3] AIChE, “Chem-E-Car Competition,” 2023. https://www.aiche.org/students/chem-e-car-competitionr (accessed Mar. 17, 2023).

[4] M. Gadola and D. Chindamo, “Experiential learning in engineering education: The role of student design competitions and a case study,” Int. J. Mech. Eng. Educ., vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 3–22, Jan. 2019, doi: 10.1177/0306419017749580.

[5] W. Chen, U. V. Shah, and C. Brechtelsbauer, “A framework for hands-on learning in chemical engineering education—Training students with the end goal in mind,” Educ. Chem. Eng., vol. 28, pp. 25–29, Jul. 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.ece.2019.03.002.