Teaching Multidisciplinary Engineering Principles Through Environmental Topics

Environmental topics such as pollution prevention, pollution remediation, natural resource utilization, as well as global and local weather studies provide excellent catalysts to teach a wide breadth of engineering principles. Since environmental issues are real and tangible to most students, engineering applications involving the environment tend to capture the students’ interest. Environmental topics also provide a great opportunity for discovery, learning, and meaningful application of learned mathematic, scientific and engineering and principles. For instance, having students explore ways to extract energy from natural resources exposes them to a variety of topics such as thermodynamics, power generation, energy transmission and storage. Through such topics as thermal pollution and weather monitoring, students are exposed to heat transfer, partial differential equations, sensor design, and signal processing. In virtually all environmental topics, students can experience the synthesis of concepts and methods of many different disciplines, which is truly the essence and purpose of engineering.