Illustration of “green roofs” used in one of the student podcast assignments.
For their final project in a second-year engineering course in statics, students were given a novel assignment: produce a six-minute podcast discussing a major, real-world engineering project and its impact. The result surprised even the professor, Ed Berger.
Not that Berger doubted students might be more engaged by creating a podcast than writing a paper. What was most satisfying was that the exercise achieved his goal of getting the students engaged in big-picture engineering questions. As student Ryan Kelly put it: “The podcasting assigment helped me to see the world as an engineer, not just as a student studying engineering.” That comment had to be music to Berger’s ears.
The class project divided the students into four-member student teams to produce podcasts that discussed projects such as the Hoover dam, sustainable building practices encouraged by the LEED standard, the new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River. The podcasts also addressed how such projects impacted (or would impact) the economy, the environment, tourism or the local community.
After spending an hour learning Apple’s GarageBand software, one student said she felt “liberated” to express herself creatively, and the podcast project was widely described by the students as “much more fun,” “interesting” and “creative” than writing a paper on the same topic.
Part of Berger’s reasoning for the assignment was that “things are always getting in the way of kids saying what they want to.” Podcasts, he thought, would let students use the spoken word, pictures and diagrams (use of video footage was prohibited, because working with it is much more time-intensive). And, unlike a traditional group presentation in class, students didn’t have to suppress public speaking anxieties, since they could re-record the narration until they got it just right.
One class member, Cassie Jordan, said that conveying her thoughts in the podcast was easier than in a paper, because of the advantages of the spoken word over the written word, especially being able to use intonation and humor.
Berger, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, concluded that the podcasts allowed students to express their passion and knowledge of engineering far beyond what was evident from the traditional assessments on weekly problem sets and tests.
Statics is the first engineering course that the many structural disciplines take, and it’s profoundly important that students really understand the material, Berger said. Along with the barrage of equations, diagrams and problem sets, students need opportunities to see how exciting real-world engineering projects can be. Producing podcasts proved to be an easily accessible way to do so. One student called the project inspirational, a term, Berger noted, not often used in engineering class evaluations. Next semester Berger will teach the same students their next statics class, and he’s already planning what their podcast assignment will be.
Berger is not alone in using podcasting to further the educational experience of first-year engineering students. Professor Silvia Blemker asks students in her ENGR162 course to develop material for a middle school audience using the theme of the physics of sports; her students use video and still images to produce the multimedia project.
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Listen to the audio of a podcast on Environmental Sustainability.