Teaching philosophy
Engineering design and application provides the infrastructure necessary to sustain civilization and provide for quality of life. The challenge for engineering education is to invest students with the skills and competencies necessary to design solutions for the challenges and opportunities humanity faces today and in coming generations. I am contributing towards this grand endeavor in two ways:
- Teaching hydraulic design concepts and their field application to control the movement, distribution, and quality of water.
- Teaching how to capture the fundamental principles and properties of nature in mathematical expressions, implement these equations in computer models, and use these models to understand physical processes and to design solutions to problems.
The next generation of engineering students faces broad global problems in water resources: scarcity issues, balancing the often competing needs of urban development vs. rural agriculture vs. ecosystem function, adaptation to climate change (predicted warmer temperatures with the need for more water and more extreme events), restoration of polluted waters, etc. These students are uniquely positioned to deal with such issues with the advent of a plethora of electronic data reserves, computational platforms, and internet connectivity. Engineers must be prepared to wrestle with often seemingly intractable problems, where various alternatives must be evaluated to make the best possible choices.
Educational activities that specifically address these issues include:
- Courses begin by introduction of basic principles and processes with hands-on laboratory demonstrations using apparatus designed and built by teams of students in my classes.
- Case studies are conducted by teams of students whereby students: locate and organize data using modern GIS computer tools, develop and apply computational models, develop design recommendations, and justify their design to their peers in the classroom.
- These case studies and supplementary material explore how to solve practical problems in both the Kansas region and internationally.
Throughout courses, I use active learning techniques that foster education of students with different learning styles (e.g., group projects, role playing, voting the dots, small group and classroom discussions). These techniques allow students to reflect on the lecture material and hence master and retain more information.
