Flipping the Capstone Process Design Course

Daniel Lewin, Chemical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel
Abigail Barzilai, Center For The Promotion Of Teaching And Learning, Technion, Haifa, Israel

This paper describes a flipped version of the capstone design course taken by all the 4th Year Chemical Engineering undergraduate students (taken by approximately 90 students each year), now in its third offering. Our restructured course features includes three main components: (a) On-line lessons, taking students up to three hours to cover at home in their own time, and in advance of the class-session, each comprising of a sequence of 5-12 short video clips and an associated quiz questions; (b) A two-hour class-session allowing for in-class activities (i.e. clicker questions and collaborative open-ended problem solving); (c) A three-hour active tutorial session, in which groups of students solve classwork (previously called homework). The students are graded on their performance on an exam featuring open-ended problems, as well as on the basis of course projects, completed in groups of five students and credit for the on-line self-learning, as monitored by quiz grades.

The curriculum of the course consists of four segments: (a) An overview of the design process itself, and including discussion of ethics, safety and environmental protection issues; (b) Plant economic analysis, focusing on capital cost estimation and on profitability analysis; (c) Systematic design methods such as separation system synthesis methods and heat exchanger network synthesis; and (d) Plantwide control, HAZOP and HAZAN. This is quite a full schedule, and the coverage of this broad array of materials is enhanced and intensified by having adopted a flipped approach – it means that students come to class meetings and tutorials better prepared, and able to take on higher-level tasks together with the course staff. Furthermore, the performance of the students in the final exam was significantly improved using the flipped-class approach.