(78f) Creative Student Activities to Enhance Teaching on Heat and Mass Transport

Transport Phenomena and Heat and Mass Transport (HMT) in particular are courses that have been taught to generations of Chemical Engineers. Such courses typically form part of the curriculum for Junior Chemical Engineering students. Popular textbooks for Heat and Mass Transport are often latest editions of older, quite successful texts, while homework problems that are given to students are very similar to the homework problems that the instructors solved themselves when taking these courses several years ago. How can the students be more engaged with the material covered in HMT? In the form of extra-credit assignments, Juniors in Chemical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma were asked to exercise their creativity and utilize their talents to generate original creative product that is related to the class material. The students were free to develop a product that could be a video, a graphic novel, a comic story, a music synthesis etc. but related to HMT. More than 80% of 122 students chose to work on such a project. It turns out that each student put on average more time in preparing their creative project than they spent in preparing for one of the tests for the class. In terms of assessment, an anonymous student survey showed that students who engaged in preparing a creative project for HMT felt that they understood the material better as a result of engaging in this activity. Demonstrations of student products will be presented, as well as assessment results for the effectiveness of this approach in enhancing student learning and increasing interest in the course.