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A learning outcome driven cyber infrastructure for thermodynamics education

Published: 16 July 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The Web portal TEST, the Expert System for Thermodynamics (www.thermofluids.net) is a courseware that is being used in Engineering Thermodynamics classes by more than 2000 registered educators around the world. The courseware combines a number of resources: tables and charts, a library of animations covering every major topic, rich internet applications ("RIAs") for simulating important thermodynamic systems, thermodynamic calculators called daemons (named after Maxwell's daemon) to verify manual solution and pursue what-if studies, and sixteen chapters of multi-media problems and examples. In this work, we present an outcome driven approach to link various resources offered by this courseware to motivate a student to learn. For this purpose, we have associated 24 learning outcomes to engineering thermodynamics, a two-semester course in most universities. For each outcome, a fixed number of problems (10) are turned into key problems, designated by a key icon next to the problem description. As a student tries to solve a key problem, the outcomes fulfilled by the problem are displayed and the progress made by the student is monitored. On successful solution or after an unsuccessful attempt, a customized recommendation of resources - what to read, what animations to browse, what tables to search, what daemon and RIA to use, etc., is made. A student can keep track of his or her progress and estimate the work required to reach various proficiency levels on a given outcome. When a large number of students start using this system, it may become possible to track which resources are more helpful in thermodynamic problem solving. A potential benefit of this approach is direct assessment of student achievements with learning outcomes, an area of high emphasis from the ABET engineering accreditation board.

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  1. A learning outcome driven cyber infrastructure for thermodynamics education

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    XSEDE '12: Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond
    July 2012
    423 pages
    ISBN:9781450316026
    DOI:10.1145/2335755
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 16 July 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. assessment
    2. learning outcomes
    3. problem solving
    4. thermodynamics

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