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Course Quizzes
For the MAE 5500 and MAE 5510 courses I designed periodic quizzes on reading material for the students. It had been noticed that students would attend class without watching the expected lecture videos, or doing the required reading. These quizzes were developed to test student understanding of material as well as assess individual readiness for in-class work.
With the incentive of these small quizzes, students improved their learning outside of the classroom through application in these quizzes. students who had before come to class unprepared now came ready and competent to take part in in-class group work. I noticed a marked shift in the student's approach to individual understanding of the material. With the quiz incentive, fewer groups were pulled along by individual group members. The majority of groups benefited greatly from this new incentivization for individual learning. Students similarly were more involved in class discussion and review sessions.
Airplanes of the Week // Friday Airplanes
I would open a discussion at the beginning of each week throughout the semester on an airplane. Airplanes were selected as examples of the principles taught in the course. In a similar vein, every Friday I would picked an unrelated aircraft that had been featured in some film or other media, as a game for students to guess the film!
These activities gave the students a purview of how the material they learned truly applied in industry. When I connected 'fun' to engineering, some students who had been previously less involved in the class became excited, and excelled! These discussions made the material more relatable for the students.
Optimizing Wing Twist
I added material to the course on wing twist for minimizing induced drag with other constraints. This was done to expand student understanding on such topics as multi-objective optimization using analytic methods, as well as overall comprehension of minimizing induced drag (a significant portion of the latter half of the course).
Student enjoyed this material as it included some strength constraint use and development, as exemplified with a bending moment question on an exam. Because of this added material, students had a better understanding of wing twist, used to decrease induced drag, as well as other applications of wing twist. I noticed that students understood this material far better than past years!
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