Romeo L. Moruzzi Young Faculty Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education

Traditional controls courses use an unrelenting “theory-first” approach, producing steep learning barriers for students. Professor Cowlagi significantly improved senior-level courses in Aerospace Engineering by providing strong real-world connections to theoretical subject matter. His most noteworthy innovation is the introduction of personalized experiments that students can conduct at home using smartphones or Arduino kits, collecting and analyzing data that are personally relevant. Because of these approaches, his students have successfully learned advanced concepts, such as Kalman filtering, that are typically reserved for graduate study.
 

Professor Wodin-Schwartz makes innovative use of high-impact practices to increase student engagement in the introductory mechanics series. Through the creation of hands-on learning activities, she helps students develop physical intuition about forces and moments in the world around them. Using innovative and authentic projects, she contextualizes engineering practice in real-world settings and connects engineering to its social outcomes. One such project was distinguished as a gold star exemplar by the national KEEN network and has been adopted by other faculty at WPI and elsewhere.

Over a five year period, Professor Konrad worked to integrate and improve an ambitious, real-world project with industry partners in an undergraduate course on simulation modeling and analysis. To address the gap between theory and real-world problems, she partnered with a client organization to introduce a project component in her course. Students appreciate how the project develops skills, introduces them to simulation software, helps them manage projects in the workforce, and exposes them to nontraditional applications of industrial engineering.

Professor Stapleton integrated role-playing into her courses to make international relations students active learners. Students learn about international relations by taking on the role of policy makers and diplomats of different countries. Integrated with these activities are intensive writing assignments and media campaigns. She has communicated the results of her work for the course at the American Political Science Teaching and Learning Conference and the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting. She has also mentored faculty at three other institutions to adopt her role-playing simulation.

Professor Albrecht’s ambitious course redesign demonstrates that significant hands-on learning experiences are feasible in large undergraduate classes and have substantial benefits for students. His redesigned bioinstrumentation course epitomized WPI’s motto of “theory and practice” in a particularly challenging context: a course with more than 100 students, most of them sophomores, and no scheduled laboratory. Handed a course that students seemed to dread, he refocused learning around a relevant and tangible goal: for each student to build their own electrocardiograph (ECG) instrument, from scratch, to measure their own heart signals.