2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The goal of this project is to ensure the next generation of Civil and Environmental (CE) engineers are prepared to design, build, operate, monitor, and maintain the vast and complex civil infrastructure systems required for a sustainable & resilient society in the decades to come. This will be accomplished by developing a series of educational modules that will shift students’ focus from a siloed understanding of the traditional CE domains, towards a holistic and advanced Civil Infrastructure Systems and Analytics mindset and skillset. Specifically, the two objectives of this project are to: (1) develop a system-level thinking module that introduces the students to the core concepts of systems engineering followed by a series of analytic modules that provide students with a foundational understanding of the analytical mindsets required for 21st century CE Engineers, and (2) implement these modules across undergraduate CE engineering courses at Manhattan University to evaluate and assess the systemic changes in STEM educational outcomes that will result from the innovative modules developed for this project. We hypothesize that analytics-based system thinking can be infused into any existing undergraduate CE engineering curricula without requiring a complete redesign of these programs. Also, our assessment results resulted in new knowledge of the effectiveness and the transferability of our research, clearly demonstrating what works and what does not in undergraduate CE Engineering and STEM education.