Design, Construction, and Destruction in the Classroom: Experiential Learning with Earthen Dams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early in their career, engineering students sometimes have difficulty linking academic concepts between courses and the interests that led to their enrollment. We present a design “interlude” event that is intended to improve experiential inductive learning and the vertical and horizontal integration of engineering courses. In this exercise, second year engineering students design, build, and test a scaled model of an earthen dam. The method integrates content from technical courses in which they are currently enrolled, such as statistics and fluid mechanics, and previews future courses in their curriculum, such as soil mechanics, hydrology, and hydraulics. Students consult with a range of experts, mock stakeholders, and mock protestors. Projects are evaluated for social/environmental impacts, technical design, cost, and performance, including stability, power generation, and spillway overflow. Student feedback was positive and highlights the intended benefits for the students, including interaction with industry partners, team building for the students, hands-on learning, and a better understanding of the impact of engineering projects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".