Proposal
Revised Scope
Progress Report
Return to Main
Proposal
Revised Scope
Progress Report
Return to Main
Chemical engineering, like most other disciplines, is at cross road. Rapid advances in the underlying science base has increased the pressure to include more material in the teaching curriculum. The educational challenge is how to incorporate new developments without either compromising the traditional emphasis on mastery of basics or increasing the number of units required for graduation. In addition there is a critical need to provide more experience for both undergraduates and graduate students in design activities that emphasize synthesis and integration of materials from many different subject areas. The Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has introduced a new course called Integrated Chemical Engineering (ICE) where the goals are to accelerate the transition of research results into the curriculum and incorporate practical experience in design. The new program has been an overwhelming success, but this success has been achieved by substantial increases in the amount of time required to develop and present the course materials. A key thrust of the proposal is that by using modern multimedia based approaches to presenting the subject interactively, compact disk storage devices for archiving the materials and advanced authoring environments to aid the preparation of course materials it is possible to substantially reduce the time to develop new ICE modules. Two research areas will be used to illustrate the new approach. One is the use of computational chemistry methods to aid the design of new polymeric materials. Another test module involves the synthesis of environmentally benign chemical processing systems. Both of the target application areas are of current strategic national importance.
Task 1:Development of a multimedia based authoring and teaching environment that simplifies the task of preparation of class materials
Task 2:Development of a new teaching module on the use of advanced computational chemistry for materials design
Task 3:Development of a new teaching module that develops the basis for the synthesis of environmentally benign chemical processing systems
Task 4:A detailed evaluation of the educational impact of the proposed research and distribution of the teaching materials to a wider audience.
In Task 1 we have surveyed the available commercial software and some of the products currently under development at MIT and other institutions. Many of the more popular packages such as Authorware Professional (Macromedia, Inc.) have had to be discarded due to their inherent platform limitations. Our course development tasks involve serious computational and visualization requirements which currently require, as a minimum, medium-range graphical workstations such as SGI or IBM RISC-based processors, in order to present complex images and data structures in real time. We are currently focusing our efforts along two avenues: a customized hypercard environment based on the Unix-compatible Metacard software, and Mosaic, a widely-distributed SGML-compatible interface to the World Wide Web, which has seen explosive growth over the past year. The first solution takes advantage of a complementary effort in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T. in which multimedia teaching tools have been demonstrated using Hypercard on a Macintosh platform. Our effort has been to convert this demonstration into Metacard for the Unix-based platforms. However, this approach is very manpower-intensive, since it does not currently include either a friendly authoring interface or a standardized set of authoring tools, which must instead be customized by hand. The second solution takes advantage of the fast-paced development of Mosaic and related network-browsing tools which offer a friendly user interface but a limited set of development tools (for example, the lack of a standardized hypertext-capable equation format). Adherence to SGML standards should, however, ensure widespread applicability and ease of dissemination by electronic means. For demonstration purposes, we have built a prototype module with sources from video and from PC-based animations illustrating SGI-based simulations which runs on a Macintosh platform under Powerpoint software.
In Task 2 the module for computational chemistry in product design has been implemented at the undergraduate level as part of the ICE senior design course. During the Spring term of 1994 a dozen students took part in the trial. The design problem involved proper selection and/or proposed design of a biodegradable polymer for use in areas where commodity polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene are technically adequate but environmentally unacceptable. Through the use of the Insight interface to the commercial Biosym molecular simulation software, examples and demonstrations of atomic and molecular concepts have been developed, and students have learned to execute simple molecular simulations to estimate important material properties as part of an overall design objective. This implementation has served to demonstrate the challenges and possibilities of electronic instruction and problem-solving using computers to both visualize and execute calculations. In Task 3 a new method for determining boiling points of complex mixtures has been developed that uses Gaussian 92 to compute molecular geometries and a statistical mechanical method for correlating the properties. The computational implementation employed a distributed computing environment that linked computers at M.I.T. with the NSF Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The lessons learned in these tasks are being considered in defining what constitutes an effective authoring environment.
Under the auspices of Task 4, a 3-day workshop for M.I.T. faculty and students took place in the Department of Chemical Engineering in January of 1994 in cooperation with technical support staff from Biosym to discuss the educational possibilities of molecular simulation and visualization. As a result, other faculty are exploring the use of computer simulations as a means to demonstrate scientific concepts and as homework within their own courses, for example the graduate level Polymer Physical Chemistry class in Chemical Engineering at M.I.T. A second workshop involving experts from other universities and industry is slated for January of 1995 as a follow up to the first workshop in 1994.
One key change affecting the project is the rapid and still-evolving nature of the world-wide network. Developments here require that we continually re-evaluate our selection of authoring tools. Currently there exists no standard for such tools, and the necessary negotiation and proper specification of such a standard remains a major concern of this project. A second challenge for the future is the deployment of adequate multimedia devices in conjunction with the requirements of advanced computational capabilities which can take advantage of the cutting-edge technology coming out of the research labs.
Our work on the Metacard interface to multimedia presentation of teaching materials has been carried out in conjunction with a related Hypercard development initiative in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Other departments are similarly interested in these efforts.
Both modules under development in this work are at the forefront of technology in the materials simulation and process design arenas. Each represents a direct and timely transfer from graduate level research to the chemical engineering classroom in the space of 1-2 years, indicative of the rapid implementation possible with electronic teaching materials. The rapid pace of research progress has rapidly left conventional textbooks behind in all but the more fundamental areas of technology. By demonstrating the design capabilities of product and process simulation, this project forges closer links between research code development and classroom implementation (and industrial practice, by extension). By demonstrating the necessary set of illustrations, interactive calculations and visualization tools which are part of the on-line learning process, education is made a closer partner in the code development stage