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Sophomore-level engineering classes often do not require students to find properties or processes in the literature, as advanced engineering courses do. Using the literature to find information is often considered part of fulfilling ABET outcome i: a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in, lifelong learning. The design project in a sophomore-level course was based on an article in Chemical Engineering Progress, and students were surveyed about confidence in ability to understand similar articles before, during, and after completing the design project. Optimizing an Organic Rankine Cycle by Bourji and Winstead (CEP, January 2013, 35-39) covers a basic Rankine cycle and a Rankine cycle with a form of regeneration, which are both covered in introductory thermodynamics courses. Students who understand the course material should understand the thermodynamics of the paper. The participants read the article and answered a questionnaire three times during the semester: before Rankine cycles had been covered in class, just after the homework assignment on Rankine cycles with regeneration was due, and just after the project based on the article was due. The questionnaire asked about understanding the article, ability to follow the thermodynamic modifications of the article, and ability to reproduce the thermodynamic calculations of the article. All three of these improved as the students learned the material in the course and worked with it through homework and the design project. Confidences in ability to understand engineering principles and to reproduce calculations of similar articles also improved during the study and were probed with separate questions. This study showed that lifelong learning can be encouraged in lower-level courses with the appropriate selection of articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One small gamification aspect was incorporated into senior chemical engineering labs. "Bragging Points" were awarded for certain things that the students should be doing in classes anyway, such as arriving on time and following instructions for reports. Bragging Points were awarded only to teams to encourage students to hold their teammates accountable. Approximately 70 Bragging Points were available during the course. Twenty Bragging Points could be converted to course grade points as extra credit on either individual exam grades or formal reports. Extra credit on multiple exams or reports was allowed, one for each block of 20 Bragging Points. A display board in the lab control room let students see which team was doing the best in the points race. Students themselves noticed that the teams with students with reputations for earning good grades also had the most Bragging Points. Anecdotally, students were on time to classes and meetings more when they received Bragging Points that in earlier semesters without them, and the faculty felt greater pressure to be on time to class, too! An analysis of the correlation of grades with Bragging Points earned and compliance with course expectations will be presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the use of articles published in "Chemical Engineering Progress" in an Engineering Science Introduction to Thermodynamics course.

The ASEE/AIChE Chemical Engineering Summer School (ChESS) is a week-long, roughly quinquennial over the past nearly 100 years, faculty development event bringing together early-career and seasoned faculty for workshops and community building [1]. The most recent ChESS took place July 25-29, 2022 at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO, with around 160 participants and 80 presenters. The two core outcomes for the Summer School are 1) to build the Chemical Engineering education community and 2) to provide useful knowledge and tools for teaching, scholarship, and service for those early in their careers. A typical day at ChESS starts with breakfast and a plenary session, followed by one to two sessions with 5-6 parallel workshops, lunch, then two more parallel workshop sessions. These are complemented by thematic networking sessions, evening poster presentation receptions and a host of social events including a scavenger hunt. One afternoon of the week, local sightseeing and similar activities are available to all participants and presenters. Most workshops are delivered by volunteer presenters from the chemical engineering education community and about 20 are offered by industry and funding agency partners. Changes in programming for the most recent offering included specific identification of pedagogical, Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and content tracks for the parallel workshop sessions. To support this structure, plenary speakers were invited to present on pedagogical practices and DEI, in addition to the long-standing Teaching Institute and industry plenary. Workshops were either 90 or 150 minutes in length and typically hosted between 20-50 participants. While the core audience is newer faculty, the more experienced faculty who attend as workshop presenters are welcome to attend other workshops, space and time permitting, and about 90% of them did so. A survey conducted immediately after the close of ChESS 2022 showed respondents found it to be successful at meeting its two goals. 96% of respondents somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that the Summer School was conducive for meeting other Chemical Engineering faculty, while the same fraction somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that the workshops were useful. 93% of respondents strongly agreed that they would recommend the Summer School to a colleague, with a further 3% expressing some agreement. This paper shares details on the program, funding, and overall design of the Summer School as well as some reflections and recommendations from the steering committee. It also summarizes the results of the immediate post-Summer School survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the truly distinctive elements of a chemical engineering undergraduate experience is working with larger-scale process equipment in a laboratory setting. Unit Operations courses seek to expose students to the type and scale of equipment they are likely to see in industry and to equip them with the ability to analyze the behavior of these systems as well as have a true "feel" for how they work (or don't work quite as expected). For the 2017 survey, the AIChE Education Division Survey Committee focused on the laboratory portion of the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum. Over 70 programs completed the survey, which asked about course structure, hours, and experiments. The typical undergraduate takes one or two laboratory-focused courses within chemical engineering, completes experiments as part of a team, and has at least some exposure to pilot-scale equipment. Virtual experiments make up about 10% of control system experiments and are otherwise relatively uncommon. This paper reports on the survey's key findings as well as some of the highlights of innovative laboratory experience and pedagogy discussed in the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]