Engage Blog
Teach concepts of Thermodynamics with the beverage loved by students and faculty alike!
Demonstrate systems, properties, and substances, and entropy using the simple materials for brewing up your favorite cup o' joe.
You recognize the signs.
You're holding office hours after handing out problem sets or exams you've graded. A student walks in holding the recently returned effort, looking confused, upset, and possibly annoyed. It's going to be one of those conversations.
With this ENGAGE Engineering Faculty-Student Interaction (FSI) tip, you can set grading expectations up front, avoid lengthy explanations for grades, and encourage students to persist with specific feedback and suggested improvements.
The semester is well underway and your class content may be increasingly challenging. Now is the time to engage your students, reduce intimidation, and build their confidence in their ability to succeed.
Small things make a big difference. Take a look at this ENGAGE Faculty-Student Interaction tip (FSI) and make sure you're covering the high-impact basics.
Asking questions is a fundamental part of the learning process. Yet many students hesitate or hold back in class.
Here's a question for faculty: How can you support students in asking more and better questions?
ENGAGE Engineering has some easy-to-implement ideas you can use right away.
A new semester has begun! For first- and second-year engineering students, getting off to a good start includes making an early connection with faculty that helps them stay engaged as the term progresses.
Take advantage of ENGAGE's Faculty-Student Interaction strategies. In just one minute per class, you can foster deeper student engagement that will carry throughout the semester.
You know those gateway courses that derail many an undergraduate from pursuing an engineering degree: Physics. Chemistry. Calculus. Engineering Graphics.
If you want to help students clear those gateway course hurdles with confidence, NOW is the time to plan. It’s summer and you’ve got the time. ENGAGE Engineering has resources to make it easy.
Proactively managing faculty-student interaction is easy with ENGAGE Engineering’s Faculty-Student Interaction strategies. They are research-based, time-effective, and easy to implement. And the payoff in terms of student retention can be substantial.
Check out these FSI tips and build one or more into your upcoming classes this fall.
Have a Happy Independence Day on July 4th! The iconic Statue of Liberty is a powerful symbol recognized by people all over the world. Lady Liberty is familiar, easy to relate to, and she’s… blue-green. A perfect subject for an Everyday Example in Engineering!
Take a look at them now while you have the time, and build one or more into your course syllabi for the fall. Your students will benefit and there’s evidence that teaching evaluation do, too.
On a hot day in a warm classroom, an ice cold drink is already on the minds of your students.
Shake up a carbonated soft drink to demonstrate concepts of active power, reactive power, and apparent power.
Finals week is right around the corner.
About this time every semester,undergraduate students’ confidence in how much they really understand, and how well they can score well on your final, often gets a little shaky. The pressure is on... and not just on them. How about the pressure on your office hours?
Beat the rush, make office hours fun, and reduce stress while assisting students before finals week with this ENGAGE tip to make office hours more productive with small groups.
Here’s a light and breezy tip for STEM faculty!
It’s April, spring is here, and you may be experiencing some good kite-flying weather. It’s a great time to teach students about aerodynamic forces. ENGAGE’s Everyday Examples in Engineering make it easy with a ready to use lesson plan on Aerodynamics of Kites. Check it out on ENGAGE Engineering.org and try it with your students!
ENGAGE Engineering started 9 years ago today. Celebrate by adding this Every Example in Engineering to your next lesson on thermodynamics!
Using a cupcake, candle, and glass cup or jar, you can add this easy-to-implement Everyday Example to your next lesson plan to teach the thermodynamics concepts of combustion and reaction mixtures.
You may be wondering how it’s possible to marshal the commitment and resources to provide SVS training for at-risk students.
According to Jackie Sullivan, University of Colorado at Boulder, “We decided that the literature was so clear on this. This was an issue of broadening participation. Look what we spend on recruiting women students, look at the money we hemorrhage when we lose these talented young women from our pool of future engineers. For us, it was a societal imperative.”
Learn about CU-Boulder's scalable 8-week intervention workshop.
Heads up, engineering faculty! March Madness is heating up as we approach the Final Four, and here’s a slam dunk lesson plan to increase your students’ interest and understanding of eccentric loading.
Check out this Everyday Example in Engineering that explores the load on a basketball pole during different types of play, and think about entering your classroom with a bouncing basketball!
There's no time like the aftermath of a massive, show-stopping blizzard to introduce students to the concept of colligative properties.
A Snowy Everyday Example in Engineering: One of our most downloaded lesson plans!
Increase the likelihood that your students will be interested in, intuitively understand, and better retain the information they learn.
Put cookies to work in your classes!
Students can feel intimidated and hesitate to ask questions or seek help. They need to be convinced that you are approachable. With the right conversation from you it can happen in 20 minutes.
Students who struggle with spatial visualization skills (SVS) have trouble succeeding in engineering gateway courses like engineering graphics. They are vulnerable to transferring out of engineering and into another major.
Research indicates that a basic level of proficiency with SVS is critical to persistence in engineering. The good news is that with practice, students can improve this skill.
Find out what you can do to help your students.
Dr. Chun Wu created a popular Chemistry lesson plan with over 45,000 downloads from the Engage website that asks and answers this question,
“Why is the Statue of Liberty blue-green?” to explain the concept of oxidation reaction.
Explore the broad range of ENGAGE Engineering lesson plans that incorporate familiar and engaging examples to improve student engagement, increase retention of engineering students, and improve student evaluations of instructors.
An Everyday Example a Day Keeps Students Engaged in Engineering
Demonstrate engineering concepts using familiar and relatable examples to increase student engagement and persistence!
What are Everyday Examples in Engineering (E³s)?
E³s demonstrate engineering concepts based on objects and ideas familiar to students, like exploding soda cans, musical instruments, or bicycles. E³s are more engaging to students than typical examples such as I-beams and boiler pipes. Familiarity provides students with a level of comfort and some basic intuitive understanding.
Local weather is a great inspiration for familiar, relatable examples that help students learn foundational engineering concepts.
When classes begin in August, for example, you can introduce students to the First Law of Thermodynamics with E3s incorporating air conditioning, sweating drink cans, and misted glasses.
We’ve had a great sports-filled summer with Wimbledon, the Tour de France, and the 2016 Olympics. Watching these events provides great inspiration to exercise and develop our own skills, as well as great entertainment. But have you ever noticed how sports also make for great Everyday Examples in Engineering?
Take a look at our ready-to-implement lesson plans and incorporate one or more into your upcoming courses this fall. You might also come up with an Everyday Example for a sport that isn’t represented here! Curling, anyone?
Attention STEM Faculty: Friday, June 24, is Take Your Dog to Work Day.
As you consider giving Barney a bath before bringing him into the office, notice what a great example you have here of overcoming surface tension with centripetal force! Check out ENGAGE’s Everyday Example in Engineering lesson plan called the Wet Dog Shake.
The semester is over, grades are turned in, and it’s time for STEM faculty to enjoy a well-deserved break!
All of us associated with ENGAGEEngineering.org wish you a productive and enjoyable summer. We also want to thank you for taking advantage of our online resources this past year as part of your student engagement and retention efforts.
We’re going to stay in touch with you over the next few months. Summer is the best time to begin incorporating our resources into your course planning for fall, and we’ll make it easy for you!
Teach your students about vibration, waves, and sound with ENGAGE Engineering’s ready-to-implement lesson plan called The Guitar.
Do you play? Consider entering the classroom strumming your guitar or ukulele… now that will get your students’ attention!
Just like the Gregorian calendar, we can all benefit from a little periodic realignment.
For engineering faculty, that’s where ENGAGE Engineering’s Faculty-Student Interaction Strategies come in!
These time-effective, ready-to-implement quick tips can have positive impacts on student learning, success, and retention. Course evaluations improve too!
Heads up, Engineering and Physics faculty!
January 18, A. A. Milne’s birthday, is Winnie the Pooh Day.
Celebrate with an Everyday Example in Engineering lesson plan on buoyancy. Watch the creative animated short where Pooh and Piglet soar above the treetops with just three balloons. Then ask your students, “How many balloons would it REALLY take?”
Check out all our Everyday Examples at ENGAGE Engineering.
Sometimes we forget how much language, experience, and what is familiar, differ for people based on their age.
Dr. Bernd Schroeder of Louisiana Tech University created an everyday example in engineering using soda cans to pose the calculus problem: Is the Shape of a Soda Can Truly Optimal?
What's Your Everyday Example? Find out how to start.
Heads up, engineering faculty!
Next Wednesday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day – a perfect time for an Everyday Example in Engineering that involves chocolate!
Introduce first-year students to chemical engineering and its role in food processing with this lab-based lesson plan that’s familiar, relatable, and above all, tasty. It’s bound to be a hit with your students.