(445d) Teaching with Cases in Chemical Engineering

More and more students are graduating from chemical engineering programs and heading into careers beyond traditional chemical engineering (i.e. commodity chemical). As such, there is a growing need for curricula and faculty to better prepare students to apply their problem solving skills to a wider variety of problems and fields, and expose students to the possibilities of chemical engineering training beyond the plant or refinery. Drawing on a wider range of examples allows for greater student motivation, an important for academic success in chemical engineering. Thus, a major driver for improving our teaching was to consider how we can help students see chemical engineering thinking as a more transferable and useful skill beyond the classroom, a known challenge when using traditional chemical engineering problems. This is not a new idea in chemical engineering education, having been advocated in previous calls for curricular change from the turn of the century, and continued innovation in effectively implementing pedagogical strategies to aid in this transfer of chemical engineering skills are still being sought.

Case-based instruction is a pedagogical approach common in law, medicine, and business, but is relatively less common in science and engineering. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (NCCSTS) at the University of Buffalo promotes STEM case instruction, and maintains the Case Collection–peer-reviewed case database–with the National Science Teaching Association. Many of the sciences have a large number of cases, with 100+ chemistry entries in the collection’s of 1000+ cases, for example. However, the NCCSTS Case Collection houses a paltry 13 chemical engineering cases as of Spring 2023, only 5 of which are appropriate at the introductory level when students are just starting to engage with the discipline (chemistry in comparison, has about 100 cases available through that database). Other resources for chemical engineering pedagogical resources (e.g., LearnChemE and AIChE Concept Warehouse) host few cases. The limited availability of chemical engineering cases shows the benefit to our field in the development of relevant case studies, especially at the introductory level where student experience is highly correlated with persistence and motivation within the major.

Since Fall 2019, we (the instructors authoring this paper) have begun implementing case-based learning within our Material & Energy Balances course (MEB, a.k.a. Introduction to Chemical Engineering) to help students focus on transfer of their burgeoning chemical engineering skills. In our MEB course, cases are implemented at a variety of time scales; cover a variety of sectors (e.g., commodity chemical, energy and the environment, biopharmaceutical); and place students as chemical engineers in a variety of roles (both traditional and non-traditional). The shortest cases are run as in-class activities (~50 minutes) where students are placed in more traditional chemical engineering contexts (e.g., process engineering), and tasked with making a process design decision. Students are guided during the following discussion to find contexts in which their choices may differ, even with the same calculated results. Examples include selecting between synthetic pathways that differ in production and safety, and improving the efficiency of chemical reactors and furnaces.

An intermediary scale for the cases are assigned as team homework assignments. During these cases, students are placed in roles beyond what may be seen as traditional chemical engineering jobs to address open-ended questions based on current events. Teams of 4-5 students are given two weeks to draft a short slide deck (5-10 slides) with their proposals that are later peer reviewed. Group case homework include pitching chemicals targets that use carbon dioxide and excess solar power in California as an entrepreneur; and advising congress on incentivizing alternative fuels as an AAAS fellow.

Finally, the longest time scale for cases in the course are assigned as final projects. During the last month, student teams (4-5) are tasked with advising on a case based on unproven technologies in a written report that draws on concepts from throughout the class. Selecting contemporary challenges assures that right answers are unknown, and allows students to focus on their argumentation using chemical engineering approaches over “correctness.” Previous final projects in our class include:

• Evaluation of a pyrolysis process for carbon sequestration in partnership with Charm Industrial
• Analysis of Proton Technology’s Blue Hydrogen Production from spent oil wells
• Metalysis of regolith (moon rocks) into aluminum and oxygen using the FFC Cambridge process as described in the novel Artemis by Andy Weir

We have also written cases for graduate level courses based on chemical startups to consider how they may apply their chemical engineering decision making skills in an area that is becoming more popular for our students to enter after graduating. These cases are written to help place students in a context similar to that of a guest speaker visiting the course, working both as an in-class case (~30 minutes of discussion), but also as a background document for the speaker. When the speaker comes to share their experience working in chemical engineering practice, they also work with the students to unpack the case. This helps students better prepare for when the guest comes to class, but also gives them experience making difficult decisions (e.g., how to select a chemical product to pursue, how to find customers and a target market) before they would have to do so for real in their future roles.

In this presentation, we share how we have implemented case-based learning in our MEB course and a graduate elective, and provide data to show the effect of implementation on student learning and course experience–both in the first iteration of MEB with cases, and when the use of cases has become more mature. In MEB, we found that our students still make progress towards technical learning objectives in the course when we displaced lecture and other homework assignments with cases at different scales as measured through exams. Through surveys, we found that implementing cases had the added benefit of increased self-reported progress towards the ABET 1-7 objectives and evaluations of the course as compared to MEB prior to case-based activities. Free response data in these surveys were coded and demonstrated that students recognized the real world applications of chemical engineering in these cases, and appreciated how the cases allowed them to apply their chemical engineering thinking to a variety of contexts.

Our intent in sharing is not to convince the audience that our approach is the way to integrate case-based activities into the chemical engineering classroom, but instead of help inspire and convince more of our colleagues to try using cases as another tool to engage students in learning chemical engineering. We plan to continue to write and share our developed cases, and to further explore how these cases can be used in other parts of the chemical engineering curriculum.