Renewable and Efficient? Mechanical Engineering Students’ Conceptions of Sustainability and Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Renewable and Efficient? Mechanical Engineering Students’ Conceptions of Sustainability and EngineeringThe importance of sustainability to engineering work cannot be denied. Consider, for example,that in the 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama pledged that 80% of the energyused in the United States will come from clean energy sources by 2035.1 Perhaps unprecedented,we face enormous problems like global climate change, poverty, overpopulation, diminishingresources, and pollution, to name a few. The dominant view of engineers’ role in this currentstate of affairs is that of problem solver, or rescuer, such that engineers need only “design theirway out” of any problems we face as a global society. Rather than a reactionary focus, engineersmust be proactive and contemplative and foreground sustainability as a top design constraint tobe considered thoughtfully in terms of people, nature, and future generations. A focus onsustainability must be as heavily weighted as cost, aesthetics, ease of use, etc. But, if we are toget there, we must first change the culture of engineering education.Currently, engineering education treats sustainability as one of many design constraints thatlikely receives consideration in a classroom module, typically in a capstone design class. Onelesson is hardly enough to instill in students the importance of sustainability and sustainabledesign considerations. While some colleges of engineering have taken on grand educationalinitiatives to educate students about sustainability and the importance of sustainable design,2-3 westill have an uphill climb to truly transform engineering education to be more focused onsustainable, systems-oriented design and problem solving.One first step to transforming the culture is to learn how students view sustainability and itsrelationship to engineering. This is especially important since notions of sustainability andsustainable engineering are wide and varied.4 In this paper, we present Mechanical Engineeringstudents’ conceptions of sustainability and how sustainability relates to engineering. MechanicalEngineering, in particular, is a discipline representing great potential in terms of advancingsustainable solutions to our global environmental problems. Yet, the majority of design projectsreify a reliance on fossil fuels and old technologies that will continue to add CO2 to theatmosphere. Thus, it seems Mechanical Engineering offers a space for increased attention tosustainability.We surveyed sophomore Mechanical Engineering students in an energy systems design class togauge their views on sustainability and its importance to engineering. This represents thepreliminary phase of a multi-year project on organizational change in the MechanicalEngineering Department. Results from this study will help us develop a targeted, integratedcurriculum designed to teach students the importance of sustainability to engineering from asystems-oriented perspective.References1. Obama, B. (2011). State of the Union Address. Washington, D.C. January, 25.2. Hadgraft, R., & Goricanec, J. (2007). Engineering sustainability?! American Society for Engineering EducationConference Proceedings. Honolulu, HI: ASEE.3. Stattler, M. L., Pearson-Weatherton, Y., Chen, V. C. P., Mattingly, S. P., & Rogers, K. J. (2011). Engineeringsustainable civil engineers. American Society for Engineering Education Conference Proceedings. Vancouver, BC:ASEE.4. Hoffman, S. R., Pawley, A. L., Rao, R. L., Cardella, M. E., & Ohland. M. W. (2011). Defining “sustainableengineering”: A comparative analysis of published sustainability principles and existing courses. American Societyfor Engineering Education. Vancouver, BC: ASEE.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".