(459c) Improving Communication Between Sophomores and Juniors through Chem-E-Car Project

Chem-E-Car Competition has become one of the signature events of the Annual AIChE student conference gaining attention from various student as well as professional attendees. Despite the increasing participation by a wide number of AIChE Student Chapters, opportunities to use chem-E-Car as a teaching tool have been overlooked. For example, the Chem-E-Car competition is a powerful tool to enhance technical writing skills, provide engineering analysis opportunities, and apply team management skills. The Chem-E-Car competition has been utilized for the last few years as part of multiple courses in chemical engineering curriculum at Oklahoma State University. Typically, a number of teams comprising of three to five juniors were formed in the Fall semester for the competition to be held in the subsequent Spring semester. Three to six sophomores were included to enhance cross-class participation and to provide application-oriented examples. A folder containing compartments for log sheets, pictures/sketch, reaction/safety, analysis, and calibration was given to each team. The sophomore chemical engineering students were engaged in many components of technical communication. They kept lab books on their experiences, developed posters for the competition, reflected on meetings with the junior students, and wrote team reports and individual reflection. Lessons learned from the point of instructors will be presented.