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As a result of Covid, faculty made a great many changes to how they teach as additional resources were developed for remote instruction. Even as students return to in-person instruction, these resources may offer unique opportunities to enhance student learning. This paper will explore how we have used videotaped lectures created for remote delivery of two thermodynamics courses: an introductory course and an applications course, to implement a flipped classroom structure. In this model, rather than information being shared in a group setting, the instructor provides individual feedback as students work on problems in small, selfselected groups. We will describe how these classes were delivered and present preliminary analyses of data used to study student attitudes, expectations and learning from the student and faculty perspectives. This paper reports on feedback collected from student surveys, student interviews and instructor reflections. The study is based on data collected during Fall 2021 at a predominately undergraduate institution. Each class has 30 students enrolled. The introductory course is typically taken by upper sophomores, lower juniors and the second course taken by seniors. Student surveys were collected from all students periodically during the semester about how they were studying and learning. Student interviews further explored these experiences. Finally, instructor reflections examined how this approach to flipped classrooms is implemented and how it enhances the student experience. These data provide insights about how faculty and students can use this new approach to instruction and learning. The data suggest student responsibility for learning become more student focused and student controlled as work shifts from the tradition model of attending in-class lectures and taking notes, to watching videos before class, taking notes and working problems to prepare for an in-class, interactive experience. Based on these data, the authors propose a five-element model for implementation of STEM flipped classrooms. This model includes three student-focused and two instructor-focused elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of Thermodynamics is imparted to students in different engineering programs. Students in Colombia usually take the course between the fourth and fifth semester of their academic programs. The course has historically presented high loss rates due to the difficulty of understanding and appropriation of concepts. Consequently, the professor started a project to help students in the course, by using ludic-evaluation methodology. The article presents the most important results of student perception in self-efficacy, engagement and achievement of learning objectives. The a ludic evaluation methodology was applied prior to the first theoretical evaluation in of Thermodynamics course at Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla-Colombia) in three different cohorts (one in 2015 and two in 2016). The study is structured in four phases and includes the interaction with other academic support offered by academic peers within the same university. The first phase occurs two weeks before the application of the theoretical evaluation, and includes ludic-evaluation with a video game to diagnose the level of achievement of the learning objective. The second phase, includes academic peer support and uses the results of the ludic-evaluation, to carry out improvement actions. The third phase performs the theoretical exam. During the final phase, the professor applies a survey to the students to obtain their perception about the subject, the way they learned and their role as students within the achievement of the learning objective. Results show that students have an open mind to learn and increase their level of engagement to the subject, also improving on the objective results at the end of the course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first course in engineering thermodynamics is considered an aboveaverage challenge by many engineering students. The mathematical rigor of the course is surely not the reason; the requirements of understanding substance properties and of developing methodical problemsolving techniques, likely, are major causes. We have modified our teaching methods in this course to an inverted or flipped classroom that employed less formal instruction techniques than the traditional lecture. Our smaller classsizes (typically less than 30) allow for direct instruction by the instructor and the peer mentor, group problemsolving, and other techniques. This paper discusses observed effectiveness of using nonlecture techniques compared to a lecturebased course. The results of lecturebased courses were observed over several years. The results are compared to results in nonlecturebased courses, taught by the same instructor, in two offerings in Fall 2012 and Fall 2014. The Thermodynamics Concept Inventory has been used as well as overall performance on quizzes, projects, and exams. Other qualitative observations are also discussed. Positive effects were previously observed in the nonlecture course compared to the lecture course and this paper discusses our most recent observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A group project was introduced to undergraduate students in engineering thermodynamics. The goal was to provide students an opportunity to work in groups to apply fundamental principles of thermodynamics that were taught in class. The principle motivation behind introduction of the group project were to examine if learning effectiveness is improved when students work in groups and also to determine whether application of fundamental principles to real-life problems enhance student learning experience. The undergraduate class included students from a range of engineering disciplines, including mechanical engineering, civil engineering and electrical engineering at mostly the junior and senior levels. The lectures in class primarily discuss fundamental principles related to the first and second laws of thermodynamics with some examples of applications related to power cycles and refrigeration. For the project, the students were encouraged to explore relevant topics from day-to-day life where principles of thermodynamics could be employed. Each group comprised 5-7 students with varying performance based on quizzes, homework and in-class exams. The projects were evaluated based on a written report and group presentation that clearly mentioned the contribution of each member. Additionally, students were encouraged to make anonymous comments on their overall experience in working towards the project. The outcomes of the assignments as well as anonymous comments are analyzed to provide qualitative and quantitative insight into the effectiveness of the student group projects. Overall, this article will present the outcome of the student group projects and its effectiveness in engaging them and improving their understanding of principles of thermodynamics, relative to their overall engagement and performance based on other assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Thermodynamics is a difficult course for many undergraduate students due in part to the complex nature of the concepts learned. Pedagogical literature has suggested that students learn difficult concepts better when they are presented in different formats that address different learning styles (verbal, visual, etc). During the last two years a new student project called "thermodynamics in the arts" has challenged students in an introductory thermodynamics course to represent one thermodynamic concept in an art project. Each team of students selected a thermodynamic concept and a different art medium including poetry, sculpture, music, painting, drawing, photography, and creative essays. Concepts the students visualized included entropy, enthalpy, irreversibility, exergy, phase change, Carnot cycle, Brayton cycle, internal energy, work, radiation, convection, and conduction. Assessment of the artwork used a rubric that included artistic merit, but also the accuracy of the thermodynamic concept explored. A survey of the participating students was conducted to determine if the intersection of art and thermodynamics helped the students construct more concrete understanding of the concepts chosen. This paper explores the student perceptions of the project, presents examples of the student art projects, and provides an overview of the pedagogical merits of the project. Student survey results strongly support keeping the project for future classes. Student art examples demonstrate the success of the project and a nuanced depth of conceptual understanding of the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first course on thermodynamics (FTC), as taught in most mechanical engineering disciplines, typically follows a standard topical progression: properties of substances, first law concepts of closed systems, first law concepts of open systems, second law concepts, and cycles. Students often struggle with some concepts in courses that follow such a presentation. First, introduction of second law concepts late in the course leaves less time for students to apply second law concepts; student understanding of such likely suffers. Second, the flow of material goes from "specific" (closed system analysis) to "general" (open system analysis), which delays opportunities for students to use assumptions to develop simplified models that can be analyzed. Third, disconnects between entropy and energy prevent students from recognizing the "value" or quality of energy and why energy has different "forms" (e.g., thermal, mechanical, and chemical). This paper describes a course redesign with the following objective: improve student knowledge and application of entropy and second law concepts, and the role second law concepts have on energy conversion, by integrating second law concepts and entropy throughout the course. The redesigned course was first taught in Fall 2012 and has been taught three times. In addition to describing the course redesign, the paper uses a newly designed concept inventory to assess conceptual growth of students in the redesigned course. The concept inventory reveals that students in the redesigned FTC capture some second law concepts better than students in the conventional FTC; these concepts mostly include those related to exergy (the availability of energy to do useful work). On average, however, students in the redesigned FTC score about the same on the second law concept inventory as those students in the conventional FTC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will improve the way you think about teaching thermodynamics. The scope of this work is to focus on cooling systems and, in particular, the most common cooling systems based on the vapor compression cycle. Unfortunately, traditional methods of teaching thermodynamics do not equip students with the tools they need to optimize the vapor compression cycle. This work will provide you and your students with the tools they need to design and optimize the vapor compression cycle within the first semester of thermodynamics. "Design" like the word "love" is overused to the point where it has lost its meaning. When design is used in the context of cooling systems typically what is understood is that the size of the cooling system is to be determined. Sizing the system is an important first step. But design is more, much more, than sizing. When you design a cooling system, you want the best cooling system for the application. This leads you to another overused and misapplied word; "optimization". In any optimization process, one needs to determine the objective function. This is a function that has a minimum or maximum. Traditional thermodynamics equips the student with the ability to determine the coefficient of performance (COP) and irreversibilities of each process of the cycle. When optimizing the system, they may be tempted to maximize the COP or minimize the irreversibilities. Unfortunately, these objective functions do not yield a realistic optimum because as you approach the optimum the sizes of the heat exchangers go to infinity. The only viable objective function for the optimization of cooling systems is the total life cycle costs (TC). The goal is to minimize the total costs as a function of the design variables which, in this case, are the heat transfer surface areas of the evaporator and condenser and the isentropic efficiency of the compressor. For example, if heat transfer surface area is your design variable then as the area increases so does the initial cost. But competing against the initial cost are the operating costs which decrease with increased area. The relationship between area and costs will be discussed rigorously later in the paper. After bringing the future operating costs to their equivalent present value add them to the initial cost to obtain the total life cycle cost. Too small of an area and the operating costs are excessive while too large an area and the initial cost is excessive. The total costs will yield a distinct minimum, see Figure 6, where the area is the optimum size. To assess student understanding of these concepts a quiz was administered to a group of twenty five students where thirteen students were taught traditional thermodynamics and the remaining twelve were taught thermodynamics as presented in this paper. When asked the best objective function for optimizing an energy system five out of the eleven traditional students or 45% correctly identified minimize total cost over the life of the system. With this new method, eight out of ten respondents or 80% provided the correct answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the conceptual difficulties encountered by students in physics, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering thermodynamics in understanding thermodynamics concepts between different disciplines. Topics covered include the extent to which students use appropriate concepts and tools when solving thermodynamics problems and lessons from pedagogical approaches in each discipline that can improve instruction within and across disciplines.

The article details the development of an interactive virtual laboratories designed to assist engineering students identify and learn threshold concepts in thermodynamics. Topics covered include the validation of a set of at least six proposed threshold concepts in thermodynamics, the development of the laboratories based on engineering education best practices, its delivery using the studio architecture, and evaluation of the perception and effectiveness of the laboratories.

In this project, we explore the use of threshold concept theory as a design basis for development of Interactive Virtual Laboratories in thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a difficult subject for chemical and biological engineering students to master. One reason for the difficulty is the diverse and challenging set of threshold concepts that they must coherently synthesize and be able to apply in a diverse range of contexts. Based on our experience and from reports in the literature, we have identified a set of threshold concepts we propose are critical for mastery of thermodynamics. To help students better learn these concepts, we have been developing Interactive Virtual Laboratories. This paper describes the development and initial investigation of two such laboratories. They are available for instructors to use through the AIChE Concept Warehouse website (http://cw.edudiv.org/). The Interactive Virtual Laboratories are a series of two-dimensional simulations designed to address the targeted threshold concepts. The design of these laboratories is based on allowing students to see and explore alternative representations of the phenomena that they are learning. They allow inquiry-based, scaffolded activity, and each has several activities that provide multiple representations. These activities guide students to perform virtual experiments, and also to place the virtual experiments in the context of the concepts that they are learning. They explain concepts in a way that is less abstract and more intuitive to students by providing a dynamic representation of phenomena at a molecular level. Students are expected to answer numerical questions and, whenever possible, predict and explain the effects of macroscopic changes (i.e., pressure, temperature, composition, energy) based on observations of molecular properties. In the study reported in this paper, we investigate how students experience the laboratories and whether the students perceive the simulations are beneficial towards learning. The two interactive virtual laboratories studied address the concepts of Pv work and reversible processes. Eight participants took part in the clinical study outside of the engineering classroom. All students had previously taken a thermodynamics course and had access to a thermodynamics textbook and the internet as they completed the laboratory. A "think aloud" protocol was used where students were audio recorded as they verbally described their actions in completing the laboratory. The transcribed audio recordings together with video recordings of the computer screen on which they worked were analyzed. After completing the laboratory, a semi-structured interview asked participants about their perceptions of the simulation's effectiveness, their previous thermodynamics experience, and a brief assessment of what they learned. All interviews were transcribed for analysis. The participants generally responded positively to the simulations. Seven out of eight students explicitly stated that the dynamic simulations helped them visualize and engage with the processes more than they could with the static depictions in books or lecture. However, some difficulties were observed, including interacting with the interface and understanding specifically what a question was asking. One participant found the interactivity to be unintuitive. We also noticed a relation between how the participants framed knowledge and their approach to completing the laboratory. Students who activated more sophisticated frames typically completed the simulation more quickly and accurately than those with more naive frames. Students who did not do as well tended to focus on trying to identify equations they had used in the past, even going so far as to use them in an unsuitable context. On the other hand, students who completed the simulations accurately and more quickly appeared to integrate what they were seeing on the screen with their foundational conceptual knowledge to form new understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study which explores the outcomes of a real-world design project used in a foundational course in engineering thermodynamics. Topics discussed include details on the thermodynamics course used in the study, the alignment of student learning with the study's course objectives and ABET criteria, and the aspects of the project that students found challenging.

In 2010 the engineering department at Eastern Washington University added a mechanical engineering (ME) program to its already established mechanical engineering technology (MET) program. As part of the transition new courses were developed for the pure ME program and some were redesigned to include both programs. Thermodynamics, for instance, was taught as a single class for both ME and MET students initially, with the same outcomes and requirements for each group. This coupled-course approach was also taken for other courses, as deemed practical and appropriate. This resulted in challenges to both the students from each group as well as to the faculty. MET students, for instance, were required to take only calculus I and II while ME students often had already completed calculus IV and differential equations, resulting in a dilemma for faculty attempting to present a calculus-based curriculum. The students from each program also had different goals and expectations, which further made it difficult to design course content that was appropriate to all and also meet the program requirements. To address these issues, in 2013 the thermodynamics course was split into two separate courses for ME and MET students, with very similar student pre- and co-requisites, similar program objectives, and curriculums established specifically for each program. Throughout the development of the new ME program, student learning data was collected for all students going through both the ME and MET thermodynamics course (as well as other courses), in order to help inform the faculty on how well the courses were meeting objectives. Two specific assessments were used: a student survey addressing how well the course met the course objectives and assignment grades tied to each course objective. Results from these assessments have helped direct the continuous development of these courses over the past several years. The objective of this paper is to present these data and the evolution of the thermodynamics course from purely MET, through combined ME & MET, and finally to the separate ME & MET courses. A qualitative review is also given on particular student challenges and impacts and on the program's experiences throughout this transition and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current college students are accustomed to documenting and sharing their experiences through text, photo, and video, thanks to the ready availability of all of these through personal portable devices. The democratization of video production and access has led to the possibility to both teach and learn with video as never before. This work seeks to capitalize on student expectations and the current technological environment to bring the benefits of both teaching and learning with video into core technical undergraduate engineering courses. Specifically, in this work, we ask student teams to create short, targeted, easy to understand videos about concepts in thermodynamics, and then invite them to watch the faculty-vetted library of videos developed by their peers at their own and two collaborating institutions. We are studying changes in students' conceptual learning as a result of participation in this program, and are building a repository of accurate, engaging, videos for thermodynamics learning that will ultimately be shared with other instructors and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamentals courses play an instrumental role in developing undergraduate students into skilled problem solvers. As such, these courses bear the responsibility of (1) instilling discipline in problem solving and (2) familiarizing students with central concepts of engineering. The two goals are inextricably linked. Success in problem solving is contingent upon understanding a remarkably few fundamental principles. Upon first introduction to new concepts, however, students usually lack the experience to understand how foundational those principles really are. In fact they can be adept at compartmentalizing information at the expense of building up a foundation of knowledge. While this tactic may present a hope for short term success, as the quantity and variety of problems increase, their ability to apply the appropriate principle suffers. This is why discipline within the problem solving method is so important; it forces the application of a very few fundamental concepts to a broad array of problems. This paper discusses the use of tools to encourage such discipline in an introductory Thermodynamics course. These include a first law classroom poster, first law student stickers, and guided in-class examples to encourage repeated application of the same principle to a myriad of problems presented to them in class, as homework, and on exams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many engineering students have difficulty explaining the fundamental concepts used to solve thermodynamics problems. For example, students may be able to solve problems by neglecting kinetic and potential energies, yet struggle to explain why this is justified. Likewise, they will assume steady-state behavior, yet have difficulty to explain why. Students learn to approximate the evaluation of fluid properties, yet cannot provide a reasonable summary of the justification for these common approximations. Common areas of poor student comprehension are identified and alternative pedagogical strategies have been explored to improve student learning. A series of conceptual questions are employed in lectures, quizzes, and exams to emphasize concepts throughout the semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum is designed around subject matter courses such as Statics, Control Systems, or Thermodynamics. While significant effort may be applied to the development of problem solving skills within these courses, the perspective of the students is typically bound to the subject being taught. As a result, students often have difficulty in applying methods learned in one class to the solution of problems in another class, just as they often have difficulty in seeing the interconnections between different subjects. This paper describes a course on problem solving across a wide range of (math-based) problems encountered by mechanical engineers. The course includes some lectures, including a review of ordinary differential equations and an introduction to numerical methods - but a significant component is the assignment of "analysis problems" which require more effort to solve than the typical engineering homework problem. In some cases, these problems require students to apply familiar concepts, such as Newton's Second Law of Motion or the First Law of Thermodynamics, but in a way that goes beyond the problems typically seen in an introductory Dynamics or Thermodynamics course. Other problems require students to apply concepts from multiple courses. Some of the problems are ambiguous or poorly defined, requiring additional assumptions or clarification in order to obtain a well-posed mathematical problem. Throughout the course, emphasis is also placed on adequately citing references, validating solutions, and communicating results. Student work was assessed primarily through evaluation of written reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first course in thermodynamics has traditionally been a challenge for students in engineering programs. The course typically introduces students to concepts of energy and continuum mechanics, both of which are novel to the students. Often, the theory relies upon still-new calculus concepts for the students. With such a dense topic, this course is most often delivered in a traditional lecture-based structure. In a program throughout 7 partner universities, this first course in thermodynamics has a reputation for being the "weed-out" course for students. In the fall of 2013, the author took an established course having 6 lab experiments, a popular textbook, a well-evolved syllabus, and overturned the motivational structure to create a new delivery model for the course. The "Thermo-Fluids 1" course became, to students, the 7-mission "Hunt for Energy and Power". The same textbook was used in the new delivery model as had been used previously; the same laboratory experiments were undertaken by students, but students had a different approach to the workload. Throughout the course, students proceeded at their own pace, and completed 7 "missions", each with 5 levels of performance. The first 3 levels were successively more complex analytical problems. The 4th level was a lab report based on a moderately challenging open-ended lab experiment, and the 5th level was an opportunity for the student to extend a concept based on the content of the earlier lab experiment. The concept of "Design" was built into the course in a limited, but content-rich mode through having students each propose, conduct, and report on an improved development or experiment. In this paper, the author presents the results of this attempt at "gamifying" a thermodynamics course, and illustrates this one model for bringing student-directed learning into a heavy content-based course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]