Connections as a Focus for Model-Building Learning in Engineering.

Learning to create and use models of real-worldsituations is an important goal for under-graduate engineers. Engineers todayuse computer models to explore design problems and test solutions before actuallybuilding anything. Learning to create and use models of real-world sit-uationsis a challenging task. Most efforts to teach modeling are essentially a meansof teach-ing students programming, which is recognized as difficult. In theapproach described in this paper, we sought to simplify the task as much aspossible away from programming, while still requiring students tolearn to use the mathematical models necessary to understand a given sit-uation.We worked in the domain of Chemical Engineering with a tool called DEVICE(Dynamic Environment for Visualization in Chemical Engineering). What we foundthrough an iterative development effort is that emphasizing connections betweenthe real world and the mathematical model led to learning and transfer benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]