DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Courseware for Engineering Design

We felt that proper use of graphics and animation could be used to enhance the educutional experience provided by text and lectures. Electronic delivery provided a convenient means for making such supplments available to students. Furthermore, capabilities for data storage of large amounts of data and ease of revision offered the potential for rapid revision and updating of supplementary material, thereby making it possible to keep the material novel and contemporary to a degree of not possible with conventional textbooks. With the advent of hypertext and hypermedia, the supplmentary materials can be linked together in numerous ways, allowing students to explore related topics in a manner consistent with their individual learning types. The linear progression from equations to explanations to examples to problems is still available, but is no longer enforced. Lastly, of particular importance to engineering design and of relevance to electronic delivery methods is the largely untapped (to date) power of numerical simulation as a new media element. Part of our goal is to implement a facile, pedagogically-oriented introduction to the powerful real-world computational tools used by engineers in industry to address the complex design issues they face today.

Funding for this work has been made possible by the Engineering Education and Centers of the Engineering Directorate of NSF through a project entitled entitled A Module-Based Multimedia Teaching Environment -- Curriculum Development for Computational Methods in Materials Design and Synthesis of Environmentally Benign Chemical Systems. Additional funding is provided by the ECSEL Coalition and the Office of the Dean of Engineering at M.I.T.

For a brief introduction to the conceptual elements which make up this implementation, browse through the Concept Demonstration (circa August 1993), an illustration of concept presented to the NSF and engineering educators at Probject Impact in Washington D.C. in June of 1994. This demonstration contains illustrations from M.I.T.'s Integrated Chemical Engineering course, a case study design course where students learn to synthesize solutions to relevant problems in a variety of chemical engineering fields.

Materials Design

Courseware for 10.491, Integrated Chemical Engineering: Materials Design case study - an undergraduate level course in engineering synthesis and design.

Synthesis of Chemical Systems

Courseware for 10.551, Systems Engineering - a graduate level course in the analysis of process operations.

Notes on Implementation

An opportunity to send email to the developers of these pages.

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