FLUID MECHANICS PROJECT-BASED LEARNING KITS: AN ANALYSIS OF IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS IN A BLENDED CLASSROOM

Fluid Mechanics is a foundational course in civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering that is often offered as a combination of lectures, tutorials, and laboratories. In the laboratories, students typically perform experiments using commercial flow benches, following scripted laboratory procedures to conduct experiments. Without a detailed understanding for how these experiments are designed or operate, students often rely on laboratory reports written by students from previous years to guide their analysis and documentation process. From the Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive domain perspective, this represents a lost learning opportunity as analysis is one of the highest levels of knowledge activation that students can experience in a foundational course like Fluid Mechanics. The work reported here seeks to address this lost learning opportunity by increasing active student engagement using inquiry-based learning. In the Summer of 2017, 61 students participated in a flipped-delivery Fluid Mechanics course and conducted five experiments using custom-designed project-based learning kits. The benefits of adopting a project-based approach to learning are numerous, but appear specifically promising in the areas of self-efficacy and professional skills development. Through this approach, students become co-creators of their learning journey rather than passive observers using traditional “black box” commercial flow benches. This paper examines student performance and self-assessed professional skills development through quantitative and qualitative analysis of student results on a variety of assessments and surveys measuring professional skills development. Paired t-tests and hierarchical modelling were used to conduct statistical analyses of a variety of demographic factors influencing student performance on assessment. A qualitative reflection of these results is also conducted. Findings indicate that students reported statistically significant growth in most graduate attributes on two different surveys. Technically-focused attributes (1,2,3,5) ranked highest in terms of growth on both surveys, while attributes 9, 11, and 12, impact of technology on society and the environment, economics and project management, and lifelong learning also saw large improvements. Fourth year students performed significantly worse than their counterparts on the project-based laboratories, likely reflecting a lack of motivation associated with taking a second or third year course later on in their academic careers.