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Traditional chemical engineering curriculum focus on the math, science and engineering fundamentals culminating in a senior year process design course. These courses are excellent preparation for most chemical engineering jobs, but they typically omit very practical skills such as curiosity, connections and creating value. The lack of these fundamentals of the entrepreneurial mindset puts chemical engineers at a disadvantage in today's workplace. The faculty at Villanova University have made the effort to focus on EML (entrepreneurial minded learning) by creating modules that can be implemented in already existing courses. These modules all vary in time, scale, and application, but have the same goal: to introduce chemical engineers to the entrepreneurial mindset. This paper will review in depth three different modules created and presented to students. The projects vary from elective courses (intro to biotechnology and polymer science) to required courses (heat transfer operations and process design). The projects included an attempt to explore a contrarian viewpoint by evaluating "bad" plastics, design of a shower without electricity and the design of a heat exchanger for commercial scale brewery. The projects were all evaluated using student surveys and post implementation reflection by the faculty. The authors believe these same modules can be implemented in similar classes at other institutions with equal success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative study of written reflective exercises and normalized gain scores from a concept inventory assessment in a junior-level heat and mass transfer course for chemical engineers. The primary purpose of this research is to determine to what extent written reflection activities are successful at adjusting commonly-held misconceptions students have about heat transfer. As described in a previous ASEE paper (Chenette and Ribera, 2016), the authors conducted a series of prediction activities in several course sections, each with approximately 25 junior-level chemical engineering students, with either a structured follow-up reflection assignment or no structured reflection assignment after each prediction activity. The Heat and Energy Concept Inventory (HECI) was administered to students of all sections at the start and the end of the course. The overall HECI score along with HECI subcategory (Temperature vs Energy, Temperature vs Feeling, Rate vs Amount, Radiation) scores were used to evaluate learning gains. Archived data from classes with no prediction activities and no reflection activities served as a control group. To explore if the quality of reflection is related to learning gains, student reflections were ranked according to a validated rubric and compared with quantitative data on learning gains. Qualitative contributions include student responses from focus groups and student surveys. Key highlights will be discussed to provide a better understanding how the students' perception of learning is affected by these activities. Preliminary results showed a weak correlation between the normalized gain score of individual students in the Rate vs Amount subcategory and the quality of reflection displayed by each student in the follow-up reflection activity. This paper analysis of another HECI subcategory relevant to the in-class prediction activity on radiation. This analysis also includes an additional cohort of students in an effort to increase the sample size to address limitations of the preliminary results. The goal of this study is to better direct the role of prediction and reflection activities in fundamental engineering courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the new requirements and suggest strategies for implementing process safety into the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum. It provides a review of sources to help chemical engineering programs choose appropriate content and to support instruction. Suggestions for assessing the effectiveness of instruction are included to close the loop for this topic.

Good communication skills are vital for any career. Engineers are often stigmatized as being poor communicators, and while this is merely a stereotype, many engineers and STEM students do express disinterest in writing and other forms of communication. While communication is incorporated in many undergraduate chemical engineering courses through laboratory reports, presentations, and informal short answer questions, these items are generally evaluated for their technical accuracy, not on aspects of their delivery and presentation. In the chemical engineering department of a large Midwestern university, students are required to take two courses in writing and communication. The first is a general English course, the second is an elective. While technical communication is an option for this elective, so are courses in fairy-tale literature or the writings of various ethnicities. Thus, students are not explicitly required to take a course in technical communication, but rather expected to gain these skills needed for their professional careers through other coursework and external experiences. Other departments at the same institution offer discipline-specific courses in technical communication, and informal observations of the communication skills of senior-level students have suggested that our department may benefit from such a course. In Spring 2014, we piloted an undergraduate course, Technical and Professional Communication for Chemical Engineers, and with its success the course is currently being offered in Spring 2015. Course focus is on all aspects of communication, verbal (written and oral), non-verbal (body language and development of visuals), and professional skills (e.g., resume development, e-mail writing). The format of the course is heavily active and inquiry-based learning, with short lectures guiding the 80 minute sessions. A typical session generally consists of a warm-up activity that gauges the student perceptions and knowledge of the topic of interest, then a brief lecture and discussion on the topic, followed by a second activity that allows the students to practice the concepts discussed in the lecture portion. This model was adopted based on the expectation that students will enter the course with varying schemata regarding communication, each derived from varied individual experiences. The warm-up activity not only gets the students engaged in the topic from the start of class, but also serves as a guide for the lecture and discussion. Student responses to the course indicate that this is a high-value offering applicable for any chemical engineering student regardless of intended career path, and we look to establish this as a permanent course in the department. If and when the course enrollment becomes large enough, we are interested in comparing communication skills of students who have taken the course versus those who have not, through the addition of a communication specific evaluation of artifacts students are already required to develop in other department courses (the aforementioned items where evaluation is generally focused on technical accuracy). In this paper, we provide an outline of the course and student outcomes from the first offering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]