The goal of the project is to infuse sustainability concepts into three civil engineering courses using experiential learning. The project is involving students in research-quality and service learning experiences and in engaging laboratory activities both in the classroom and in the real-world. In addition, it is reaching middle school and high school students and teachers and residents in low income communities through ongoing programs The evaluation effort, with assistance from an on-campus center for instructional development, is using on-line student and faculty surveys, analysis of student products, and direct observations to monitor progress. Dissemination is being accomplished through postings on websites and through conference and journal publications. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the material, the K-12 outreach, and the interaction with the community through the service learning component.
Three professors of Civil and Environmental Engineering at two unversities, University of Pittsburgh and Arizona State University, collaborated on the project, Integrating Sustainability into the Civil Engineering Curriculum Through Three Courses, to teach undergraduate civil engineering students sustainability through hands-on interaction with sustainability concepts such that the next generation of engineers is well equipped with tools to tackle sustainability challenges upon graduation. The professors outlined two major goals for this project: (1) improve two existing courses, Green Building (GB) and Introduction to Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring (NDE) and incorporate concepts of sustainability and hands-on learning throughout the courses and (2) develop three activities that link content and student experiences throughout three courses: GB, NDE and another civil engineering course, Design for the Environment. As a result of the collaboration, two courses, GB and NDE, were significantly improved and three actvities were created to bridge the gap between engineering and sustainability. Activities that students (e.g. from a traditional engineering course, NDE) who might never be exposed to concepts of sustainability experienced first-hand how it can be important within their field. On the flip side, students in the sustainability track (e.g from a non-traditional engineering courses, GB and DfE) were afforded the opportunity to learn the intricate details of how the tools that they use work. Leveraging additional funding resources, the activities created for this project were conducted in 11 additional courses and 3 middle school classrooms, impacting in total over 500 undergraduate engineering students' education and over 100 middle school students' education. The results of this project have been presented at three conferences and published in one journal article, three peer-reviewed conference proceedings and two non-peer reviewed conference proceeding. Additionally, the resources necessary to conduct the actitives created during this project, with variations from undergraduate to K-12 student levels, have been made freely downloadable to the public via two websites, http://pitt-sgd.businesscatalyst.com/index.html and stemed.engineering.asu.edu. The project's materials continue to be scaled at multiple universites across the country, due to the positive impact of the activities on student learning of sustainabiliy in engineering.
