NSF grant funds problem solving program for students

You’re an engineer for the Verdant County Department of Transportation.

Things are going… You’re an engineer for the Verdant County Department of Transportation.

Things are going fine until you receive a memo from the CEO of an environmental engineering firm. Attached to the memo is an article reading, “For each of the past seven years, at least one person has suffered a fatal automobile accident by crashing into trees closely aligned along a three-mile stretch of Forest Drive.”

It’s your job to find a solution to the problem.

“Simple,” you think to yourself, “Just tell the people to stop speeding.”

For Pitt engineering students, however, it’s not that easy.

“What we want to have them think about is a way to engineer the solution so you don’t have to rely on people using common sense,” Mary Besterfield-Sacre, associate professor of industrial engineering, said.

“Common sense isn’t common. It doesn’t mean we want people to go 80 mph, but I need to make sure the roads are designed for full safety.”

Besterfield-Sacre and senior associate dean for Academic Affairs Larry Shuman worked in conjunction with colleagues at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Colorado School of Mines, Purdue University, University of Minnesota and the U.S. Air Force Academy to secure a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to incorporate model-eliciting activities, MEAS, into their curriculum.

Approximately $870,000 of the $2 million was set aside for Pitt.

“On the surface, they’re really no different than any open-ended problem a faculty member would give you; this just has a really strong scaffold to it,” Besterfield-Sacre said.

Because these problems are highly structured, they allow professors to pinpoint the concepts students have trouble grasping and change their teaching style accordingly.

“What we’ve learned is that these things are really hard to write,” Shuman said. “Once we get them right, we have a really good teaching tool. We can write the MEA where if the student doesn’t understand the underlying concept, they’ll use it. These can be designed to tease out students’ conceptual misunderstandings.” While students may pick up some of these misconceptions in the classroom, the bulk of them come from within.

“A lot of it is bad intuition,” Shuman said. “A lot of disasters were caused by not understanding basic concepts.”

Many of these misconceptions are enforced in everyday life.

“A lot of this is just built around general society,” Besterfield-Sacre said. “We say the sun’s setting and the sun’s rising, but the sun’s not moving. We’re moving.”

MEAs are built to help students overcome these obstacles. Sample MEAs ask students to deal not only with tree-related car accidents, but also with tire reliability, the use of ethanol as an alternative fuel and condominium pricing.

Shuman said that engineers never have all the data when dealing with real-life problems but, “You’ve got to make a decision. We want you to formalize the process.”

The MEAs are designed to train students to create solutions to problems, regardless of the fact that they lack information.

“With the data that they do have and knowledge of the information they don’t have, they can come closer to understanding [the situation],” Besterfield-Sacre said.

The students’ understanding is graded on how well it fulfills each of the six principles listed in the project’s abstract. Students’ solutions must be realistic and conducive to generalization.

Students must also create mathematical models for their solutions, as well as an effective prototype. In addition, they must document their solution, usually in the form of a memo to a fictional client, and write a self-evaluation of their work.

“We have a rubric by which we can grade to see, ‘Did they achieve all the six principles?'” Besterfield-Sacre said. “They need to take into account all the variables. There’s feasible, there are good solutions, and there are great solutions.”

Students are still given plenty of room to be creative.

“The thing about many engineering problems is that there’s no one right answer,” Besterfield-Sacre said. “You could come up with many good solutions and types of models.”

Besterfield-Sacre and Shuman adopted this teaching method because it allows them to follow their students thought processes more closely. They added, however, that their research isn’t that new.

“Students could get an A in physics and not get the basic concepts,” Shuman said. “Engineers picked this up – what we’re picking up now is third or fourth generation.”

The $2 million grant allows professors at the participating universities to focus on incorporating MEAs into different types of engineering and then pass them onto the other schools involved.

Professors as California Polytechnic State University, for example, focus on mechanical engineering while professors at Colorado School of Mines focus on chemical engineering. And Professors at University of Minnesota focus on electrical engineering and those at the Air Force Academy focus on civil engineering.

“We’ll develop at our sites and then trade off at other places,” Shuman, who incorporated MEAs into his course on ethical engineering, said. MEAs were also used in Unstructured Problem Solving, a course that was offered to juniors this summer.

The grant officially went into effect at the beginning of October.