The goal of the course is basically to combine the
materials that would be covered in two different courses in
mechanical or chemical engineering, fluid dynamics and
heat and mass transfer, to try and package that for
materials engineers within one semester because the curriculum
doesn't place enough emphasis on this material to spread it out
over two. We try to teach all of the
topics that are covered in both of the courses in mechanical or
chemical engineering within the single semester.
And that makes it, of course, a challenge to
teach, a challenge to learn the sticking coefficient,
the fraction that actually gets absorbed may not be quite as
high as in a two semester sequence but that the goal is to
teach all of that material. The students are evaluated on
two different criteria which are the quizzes and exams of various
types and the homework assignments.
I weight the homework assignments very low in their
overall grade, just enough to give them an
incentive to do the homework assignments but not so much that
we have to worry about are they collaborating or not.
Basically I don't care. If three of them turn in
identical homeworks just handwritten with different pens
that is great. It makes life easier for the
grader. And so the homework assignments
count for about 10% to 15% of the grade.
In terms of exams, we have a math quiz at the
beginning the purpose of which largely is to help them to
recall the math that they learned two or three years ago
as a freshman or a sophomore and be able to use it for this
course. Then we have two exams during
the semester. Unlike other courses,
I don't put them at the one-third and two-third points
of the semester. I put them at the 40% and 80%
points so that they can be fairly tested on the first third
of the exam with a little bit of time to study.
And then for the second and third.
And then the final exam at the end.
The final exam has two parts. There is a closed book part and
an open book part. Each student must individually
finish the closed book part. And then they turn in that
closed book part and they may open their books and do the open
book part. So the closed book part is
largely qualitative. It is outline how you would
solve this problem. Or describe the difference
between the turbulent and laminar boundary layers.
The open book part is then very quantitative,
very much centered around problem-solving.
And in every year that I have taught this course,
it has also included an essay question which varies from as
open-ended as describe a process with which you are familiar and
how the concepts learned in 3.185 help you to understand
that process more thoroughly. One other thing about the tests
during the semester is that I give them in class during the
lecture period, and then I grade them rapidly.
And then the students, during their recitation
periods, are given the opportunity to redo the parts
that they got wrong. So this serves a number of
purposes. One purpose is that it helps
the students to really learn the material very thoroughly.
That if they didn't get it right the first time,
instead of just accepting a bad grade and saying,
oh well, I didn't learn that, it forces them to really get a
good handle on every single part of that exam.
And the average during the first part is typically around
70 or so. The average after they have
done the second part is typically around 95 to 97.
The 3.185 in-class portion is composed of lectures and
recitations. There are three lectures per
week and one recitation. There is no lab directly
associated with the course, but I try to make my topics and
examples relevant to the material's project laboratory,
which is 3.082, which many students take at the
same time or before or just after it.
In addition, I have introduced a number of
pedagogical changes over the years.
One of those is this methodology of assessing how
much the students understand not only by a course evaluation at
the end of the semester and then modifying the course the
following semester, but introducing also a course
evaluation halfway through the semester.
And then going beyond that by picking up a practice which I
learned from Lori Breslow of the Teaching and Learning Labs,
which has been adopted first by the Aeronautics and Astronautics
Department, a practice known as Muddy Cards.
Muddy Cards are index cards which are handed out to students
at the beginning of the lecture. Students then take those cards
and, over the course of the lecture, will write down on them
any questions that they have, will write down what is the
muddiest point of the lecture, what is the least clear,
the most difficult to understand.
They can then use that for immediate feedback and right at
the beginning of the next lecture can go over the Muddy
Cards and say, OK, what did students not
understand? I can answer their questions
and go over something that I might not have explained very
well. And might even try an
alternative way of explaining it based on the way the question
was worded. One resource which is a part of
OpenCourseWare that was put in is a lecture that I give every
fall semester on September 11th, which is a September 11th
memorial lecture. This lecture is something which
I began writing out in detail somewhere around three months
after the September 11th tragedy in 2001.
And what this lecture covers is really how to place our work as
engineers within the context of society.
What are some positive contributions that we can make?
What are some limits on those contributions?
As careful as one might be as an engineer to try to focus on
technologies which will positively influence people's
lives, the lesson of September 11th is that even a civilian
jetliner built to bring people together can be abused by people
with sufficient hatred as a weapon of mass destruction.
So, therefore, as engineers there is a need to
try and steer our technologies toward positive uses and also a
need for faith. In fact, they will actually be
used for the purposes for which we intend them.