Borrowing immersion techniques normally reserved for foreign-language instruction and infant swimming lessons, a curriculum reform effort launched this fall at the University of Oklahoma's engineering school plunges budding civil engineers into design work in their earliest classes. The Sooner City project, named after the student-designed, Web-based virtual city that is the program's focal point, stretches across the four-year curriculum to unify students' engineering coursework.
Students begin determining basic elements of their own version of Sooner City in their freshman year, including population growth rate and the city's basic layout. As students' skills and experience grow, they will tackle increasingly complex aspects of the design, such as bridges and dams, water and sewer systems, mass transit, and geotechnical analyses.
Closing the Gap
"Civil engineering students typically don't do much design work until their fourth year," says civil engineering professor and primary Sooner City visionary Randall Kolar, "but it takes longer than a year to learn design." Consequently, recent graduates often spend more time on the job learning about design than their new employers would like, he explains.
That gap between industry expectations and educational realities hit home for Kolar years ago at his first post-college job, where he quickly discovered that four years of college and a brand new civil engineering degree hadn't adequately prepared him for the real-world design work he was expected to perform. "I decided then that if I ever taught engineering, I would focus on design," he says. Now the University of Oklahoma, with the help of funding from the National Science Foundation, is giving him the chance to put his idea into practice.
By engaging students in design from day one, and teaching them to tackle uncertainty and open-ended problems using the latest multimedia technology, the university hopes to produce engineers with more technological skill and problem-solving savvy, Kolar says.
Faculty members teaching courses in the sequence need not completely restructure them-a key selling point that Kolar says helped the project gain acceptance. Primary changes involve early introduction of a design component of the city, and focusing individual and group projects around that element. For example, a freshman AutoCAD class will incorporate preliminary layout of the city; sophomores enrolled in Strength of Materials might design building beams and columns or pump drive shafts; and juniors may find themselves developing water and wastewater treatment facilities in an environmental engineering course. In all, 14 required courses will comprise the Sooner City sequence, with 12 electives that also incorporate work on the model.
Students' Sooner City experience will really pay off in the senior capstone course, Kolar says. Students will prepare an electronic portfolio of their work, and also solve an additional, multidisciplinary Sooner City design problem suggested by practicing engineers, who will also critique the final designs.
Designing in Flexibility
For some early Sooner City modules that establish critical parameters, such as the city's general layout and population, students and professors will develop a consensus design from among all students' work. This has the advantage of requiring students to consider and evaluate approaches different from their own, while also providing a common starting point. It also makes evaluating later work manageable for professors. As students progress, advanced courses with more specialized tasks will allow more room for individual solutions, Kolar explains.
Throughout the life of the project students will design and manage much of their Sooner City Web pages themselves, using the laptops that are now an engineering college requirement. Students will use the same network-standard VRML coding (pioneered just three years ago by Silicon Graphics) found in many graphically intense computer games and other 3-D visualization programs.
Currently only the 50 freshmen enrolled in an introductory engineering and programming course this fall are participating in Sooner City. Roughly half are civil engineering majors-representing about half of the CE majors in the class of 2002. Kolar acknowledges that working the rest of the students into the program midstream will be a challenge. The curriculum will also eventually be modified to accommodate transfer students and others on atypical educational paths, he says.
Kolar expects that within five years Sooner City will be a requirement for all civil engineering majors at the university. "It is more work, more intimidating," he says, "but it is good preparation for an engineering career."
For more information, contact Randall Kolar at kolar@ou.edu, or see
www.edu/sooner-cay.
-Ray Bert
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