Engaging Engineering Students through Active and Cooperative Learning
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Engaging Engineering Students through Active and Cooperative Learning Emily Allen Bluesheet Introduce yourself to the two students sitting beside you and determine which student speaks the most languages. That person is the Key Member, who should act as the Project Manager. The person to his/her right is the Unit Analyst, and the third person is the Graphics Analyst. All three of you are in the space shuttle, and an experiment has failed. Mission Control asks you to redesign the experiment with materials at hand. The objective is to build a system that will measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere inside the shuttle, using a solar cell, a photodetector, and a lightemitting diode (LED). The solar cell is used to power the experiment; the photodetector senses light from the LED, which can be blocked by dust. You have three semiconductor diodes made out of materials with different bandgaps (Si, GaP, and InAs) and need to use one diode for each of the three devices. Which material should be used for which device, and why? There may be more than one solution.
The bluesheet activity is an example of a cooperative-learning exercise. These activities are called “bluesheets” because I distribute the problems on blue paper. I typically assign this type of activity once a week in my class, “Electronic, Optical, and Magnetic Properties of Materials,” taught at San Jose State University. This lecture/ laboratory course is composed of about 70 juniors in materials engineering and electrical engineering. With only two 50minute lectures per week, about 20% of class time is spent in cooperative learning. During the bluesheet exercise, my undergraduate student assistant (TA) and I check in with each group two or three times. We question the Unit Analyst on his dimensional analysis, or ask if the Equation Manager has used the appropriate equations, or challenge the Graphics Analyst to check that her graph has the right axes. Invariably, challenging students to perform the roles I have assigned them leads the group to the right answers. At the end of the exercise, the TA collects the work and the next day provides me with a roster indicating who was present as well as a brief summary of the class performance. Individual students are not graded on the exercise, but 5% of the course grade can be earned simply by participating in the exercises. Solutions are posted on the course Web site immediately after class. The three-member groups are formed around existing seating arrangements, so they tend to stay the same all semester, but with a new Key Member assigned each week. Bluesheets would be considered an informal or ad-hoc method of cooperative learning. More formal cooperative learning activities require the use of “permanent” groups such as base groups, which may stay intact through one semester or even through many courses. We also use bluesheets in the laboratory 66
sections, which are highly structured and include experiments, group quizzes, the bluesheet exercises, and individual exit quizzes. The lab bluesheets typically re
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