2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Hands-on learning has been shown to improve student learning outcomes, but it is challenging to incorporate this into large lecture-style classes. It is possible to introduce a hands-on component into a traditional lecture-style course by adjusting the schedule to include a regular lengthy lab-style component. However, in addition to the logistical issues of space and room scheduling constraints, students have reported feeling overwhelmed by full academic schedules and increased workload. Furthermore, the mental health crisis amongst youth and young adults has revealed feelings of isolation that were present prior to Covid and were exacerbated during the pandemic. To address these issues, I have developed activities for groups of 3 in a 90-student offering of fluid mechanics that intentionally foster connections between students. The course is an introduction to the topic and is taught mainly to junior level mechanical engineering students. This course material itself can be quite dry. These activities start with an in-class Stokes law experiment that utilizes easily transportable inexpensive materials that can be quickly distributed in class so that all 30 groups participate simultaneously. The experiment itself is well known, but the physical set-up used in this work is intentionally designed to require group collaboration for the measurements. The prompts are open-ended, so that continued teamwork is needed for the interpretation, analysis and presentation of the results. The experiment is conducted in the lecture hall during 15-20 minutes of regular class time, with additional group work using shared documents occurring outside of class hours, culminating in a written report. Subsequent group activities that encompass multiple other topics in the course are based on this initial experiment. By weaving this through the course, groups work collaboratively on topics such as viscosity, buoyancy, flow regimes, drag, creeping flows and experimental analysis. This paper describes these activities and the associated materials needed for the initial experiment. The effectiveness of this new course module on forging connections and increasing student learning and engagement will be gauged using the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument in my spring 2023 offering of the course and preliminary results will be available in June.