Effective teaching and learning of composite materials for undergraduate civil engineering students

Abstract

Motivated by two pressing concerns in engineering education, a general need for creating efficient learning environments and a specific need to educate civil engineering students in advanced composite materials (ACM), this paper is concerned with a NSF-supported effort for developing teaching guides for ACM in civil engineering curricula. The approach is based on "active learning," which consists of integrating innovative laboratory techniques with computer modeling and visualization tools to create an interactive and a collaborative team-oriented environment for students to dynamically participate in their own learning. An active learning approach is used to develop the instructional materials for ACM. The goal of the "active learning" curriculum is to create an effective learning environment where students enjoy "hands-on" experiences through laboratory experiments and computer simulations and illustrations. The general objectives of this study are: (a) to develop a framework on active learning approach, (b) to apply this framework to design teaching modules on fundamentals and applications of ACM; and (c) to translate the teaching guides into multimedia applications for use at other universities, using the Internet as a delivery medium. The developed teaching guides have been successfully implemented at West Virginia University and at the University of Akron, OH.