2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Active learning strategies, defined by one university’s learning center as any type of activity during class that engages learners in deep thought about the subject matter, have been used by the author in a variety of undergraduate Mechanical Engineering courses and have been shown to increase student knowledge. While the majority of the courses have employed a strategy similar to the Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) pedagogy, other strategies have been used in specific courses. Those strategies include assignments in which students develop wiki-pages that are shared with classmates via a learning management system (LMS), student mini-lectures, and design-your-own lab projects.
The POGIL pedagogy was started in the 1990s by a group of Chemistry professors to improve learning in their field but has since spread to other STEM subjects and even non-STEM subjects such as music. However, the availability of materials to facilitate the use of POGIL in Mechanical Engineering courses has so far been limited to Materials Science classes. This paper will describe the development and use of more than 120 guided inquiries or worksheets on which students work in small groups of 3 or 4 to answer a series of questions in Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer, and Instrumentation courses.
Results from end of course grades in six different courses have shown an increase in student knowledge in the classes taught with the POGIL-like strategies compared to the same course taught with a traditional lecture style. End-of-course feedback from students has also been positive.
This paper will also describe a sampling of other active learning assignments which were used in these courses as well as a 300-level course on Manufacturing & Design and a 400-level course on Power Generation and Energy Storage.