Horizontal and vertical integration of 21st century skillsets: Leadership, computation, and open-ended problem solving at an engineering university
Abstract
The Colorado School of Mines is an engineering school with a long track record of innovation designed to improve student acquisition of technical knowledge and skills. Previous classroom innovations have tended to focus on content, pedagogy, or classroom environment, and have led to the transformation of several traditional lecture courses into Studio courses. We have shown that the Studio modality leads to significant gains in student performance and retention, along with reduced gender performance gaps. We propose to leverage this Studio foundation into a direct treatment of additional skills that are of primary interest to the 21st century Navy and its industry partners. In particular, we propose to redevelop the curricula of several courses that affect every student at CSM, with particular focus on programs of direct interest to the Navy and civilian contractors, such as physics, nuclear engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering. These revisions will be focused around three pillars: (1) leadership and group management skills; (2) competence with software and computational tools; and (3) confidence with hands-on diagnostics and problem-solving. The redeveloped courses will feature numerous explicit cross-linkages, with many direct references to tasks and concepts covered in the other participating courses, leading to a tightly-knit unit that is broad at the freshman-level base and persists vertically through the junior and senior years. This proposal has five major components: 1) embedding of formal leadership and group management training into all participating courses; (2) expanded training in scientific computing into all participating courses; (3) curricular fine-tuning in newly-developed Studio courses, including the addition of hands-on technical tasks; (4) addition of numerous explicit linkages between all of the participating courses; and (5) and assessment and evaluation of our results. This proposal includes an assessment and dissemination plan that collaborates with local Navy recruiters to build direct contacts between CSM, Navy recruiting, and Navy institutions of higher education.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 12, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141512435
Entities
People
- Patrick B. Kohl
Organizations
- Colorado School of Mines
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy