2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The teaching of broad-based infrastructure engineering courses in civil engineering has grown considerably over the last decade. Typically, survey-type courses covering a wide variety of infrastructure topics allow enduring themes to guide specific content. In the case of one infrastructure engineering course, the enduring themes have been energy, water, and transportation. For many students, water’s basic properties are well-understood; direct observation and physical interaction with water concepts like pressure and flow rate result in an innate understanding upon which deeper knowledge can be built. Conversely, the properties of energy, especially electric power, tend to pose special challenges. Although students’ lives are inextricably dependent upon electricity, daily experiences generally do not provide for direct, physical, or visual observation of the fundamental concepts or underlying physics of electricity – unless something has gone wrong. Consequently, educators have a bigger hurdle when building on existing knowledge of energy and electricity in the classroom. To address this challenge, the authors leveraged multiple tenants of the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) model of pedagogical theory to develop a hands-on demonstrator for the direct observation of a typical household electrical system using a single chalkboard on wheels. This demonstrator allows for the study of a wide variety of electric power concepts, including the difference between energy and power, alternating current and voltage, the function of key safety features and their limitations (circuit breaker operation, ground-fault and arc-fault circuit interrupters, polarized plugs, and grounding), balancing loads, code requirements and the reasons behind them, and more. In service for over a decade, this simple, single demonstrator has helped educate over 2,300 students. This paper is a follow up to a previously published work-in-progress where the authors presented the pedagogy of using the demonstrator -- to include learning objectives, classroom activities, and a model script for a 50-minute experience -- a parts list and instructions for constructing the demonstrator, and a research plan for investigating the demonstrator’s impact on student learning. In this paper, the authors present their findings from both instructor feedback and anonymous student responses in an assessment of the demonstrator’s effectiveness as a teaching tool.