Integrated Sustainable Development Project for First Year Chemical Engineering Students

Abstract

In view of the need to equip students with 21st century attributes, for the past 15 years, first year chemical engineering students undergo specially crafted sustainable problem under the Introduction to Engineering (ITE) and Industrial Seminar and Profession Course (ISP) courses. Recently, in order to improve and create more challenging sustainable problems, the development and execution of the sustainable problem has been integrated with the Introduction to Computer Programming (ICP) course. Under the Smart Consumerism Campaign 2020 (SCC2020), students were given tasks to comprehend, calculate and formulate carbon footprints of normal daily used products. This requires students to grasp the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, among others, and challenged their critical thinking to come out with an app that could calculate carbon footprint. The integrated effort from three compulsory courses (ITE, ISP and ICP) have helped students develop important engineering skills. It represents an innovative collaboration between courses to develop students’ 21st century attributes and skills. Encouraging feedbacks from students were extracted and analysed from their reflection journals. Thus, the positive impact of course integration has validated the effectiveness and suitability of the established authentic problem based CPBL model for typical engineering courses.