2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Civil engineers will play a central role in building the communities of the future, but to do so the modern civil engineer needs better training in computing and data science in order for these technologies to be utilized effectively and equitably. Rethinking civil engineering curriculum is a daunting problem, due to complexities with professional needs, accreditation, and instructor training. Civil engineers also tend not to have the extensive programming skills necessary to directly implement materials from computer science courses. Rather than replace curriculum, educators need to develop content that can be integrated into existing courses, effectively teaching data science in parallel with fundamental engineering concepts, and in a manner that is geared towards the skillsets of civil engineering students. Just as importantly, the data science topics must be contextualized for civil engineering applications to foster concept retention. The primary objective of this ongoing NSF project is to create "plug-and-play" educational modules that meet this need, implement and evaluate them, and share them openly. A pilot implementation of these modules revealed that not only did 80% of participants feel that the modules improved their knowledge of data science, but that an even larger percentage indicated that the modules also improved their knowledge of the related engineering fundamentals used to contextualize the modules.