(65g) Continued Assessment of Green Engineering Pedagogy

In an effort to introduce green engineering concepts into an undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum, ?greened? homework problems were incorporated into a junior level, design-oriented heat transfer course. Assessment tools were developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the incorporation of the green engineering material, such as the development of a ?green engineering IQ? to measure the student's understanding of green engineering concepts. Using these assessment tools, the success of the incorporation of green engineering material was evaluated first by the instructor, and later by a student task force. The results of this previous study included the identification of five critical elements necessary for the successful integration of green engineering concepts into a non-green course. For this current study, these elements were used by the instructor as guidelines for incorporating green engineering concepts into the same course the subsequent semester. The most significant change in the way the green material was presented was the introduction of a group research project which asked students to create and solve their own green engineering homework problems based on the environmental issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina. As suggested by the student task force in the first study, these group projects were presented in oral presentation format at the end of the semester. The focus of this work is an evaluation by the same student task force of each critical element necessary for teaching green engineering that was previously developed. From this re-evaluation, the critical elements of integrating green engineering material into typically non-green engineering courses were further refined.