Bridging Theory and Practice: University of Waterloo's Experiential Learning Revolution
The University of Waterloo has one of the largest and most well-respected civil and environmental engineering departments in the world. Working with the Engineering Faculty, Enable Education helped create a fun and interesting living laboratory, which provides some of Canada's best Engineering students with an authentic learning experience, and valuable research tool.
The Faculty of Engineering has a hands-on philosophy of teaching and values the benefits of experiential learning. To enable this practical approach to learning, the University of Waterloo took the opportunity to install sensors in representative structural elements during the construction of a new building on campus This provides students with a unique learning experience by demonstrating engineering principles in action. Enable Education and the team from the Faculty of Engineering equipped the bridge with instrumental sensors, or load cells, which measure the forces generated on them. The sensors allow students to compare modeling design assumptions with what happens in the real world.
The Need
The University of Waterloo is recognized as one of the world’s top engineering, technology, and science universities, ranking 38th globally in the latest edition of QS global university rankings, putting it ahead of Yale University (43rd) and Columbia University (47th), in the United States.
As the world has become more digital and much of our daily lives and interactions happen in a virtual space, engineering students tend to spend less time tinkering and more time book learning. The Engineering Faculty at the University of Waterloo recognized this general trend and identified the need for students to have the time for tinkering and exploring, as part of their learning. To this end, when planning for the new E7 building, the Engineering Faculty conceptualized a building that could form part of the engineering students’ learning experience.
Engineers explore, test, model, and solve problems, and a tactile experience is instrumental to the learning process. At the University of Waterloo, an experiential learning process allows students to “learn by doing” through project-oriented courses, laboratory sessions, and intensive design experiences as part of their academic curriculum.
Through IDEAs Clinic activities, students learn good engineering practices by experimenting with real-world engineering problems; gain an appreciation for the connections between courses in their curriculum; apply their analysis skills to complex, open-ended problems; and exercise their creativity, judgment, and problem-solving skills. The activities provide students with a breadth of hands-on experiences in an enjoyable and safe environment.
The Challenge
While the team from the University of Waterloo brought extensive subject matter expertise, Enable Education supported the project with deep experience in system integration, where instrumentation meets education.
Enable’s team conceptualized and built the software platform that makes the data available to students, professors, and lab technicians, which came from our experience and understanding of how to create great learning.
For many years, Enable has been a training partner to NI, a multinational company that produces automated test equipment and virtual test instrumentation software to aid in researching and validating new technologies. With such innovation and leading a competitive industry, has come the need to support customers in using NI products. Effective and efficient customer education drives adoption and encourages customers to continue using and remain loyal to the product. NI and Enable’s partnership over the years has been based on NI bringing technical subject matter expertise on their business and Enable providing learning and learning-technology know-how, and this project with University of Waterloo was no different.
The Solution
The Pearl Sullivan Engineering IDEAs Clinic™ supplements a traditional engineering curriculum with open-ended activities designed to spark student self-learning and exploration.
The Facade
The building facade is an envelope of glass paneling that encloses the Engineering 5 and Engineering 7 buildings - some are windows, and some are just a glass facade. Each panel has multiple layers of glass, aluminum, and insulation. Enable Education instrumented one of these glass panels on the south face of the Engineering 7 building with strain sensors, displacement sensors, temperature sensors, and a humidity sensor to demonstrate how the glass flexes and shifts position under different environmental conditions. The information from the sensors goes to a local server owned by the university.
The Ideas Clinic Station
The Ideas Clinic Station, sometimes called the Frame Station, is an interactive lab for engineering students to carry out experiments. The Frame Station consists of modular beam and joint elements, which the students can use to build different frame configurations for testing. Attachment points for removable strain gauges, displacement sensors, and load cells were built into the frame to measure the forces acting on the structure and its deflection under different loading configurations.
The Bridge
Several pedestrian bridges connect the Engineering 5 building to the new Engineering 7 building. Enable Education instrumented one of these bridges on the south side of the structure with a wide array of sensors that can discern its loading and dynamic motion.
The bridge acts as a cantilevered beam, where one side is fixed to the Engineering 5 building and the other side rests on two load cells that measure the force applied to the bridge in three directions. Vibrations induced in the bridge by pedestrian footfalls are measured using the nine accelerometers mounted horizontally and vertically throughout the bridge. Strain gauges measure the deflections in the structural members, or “I” beams, on which the bridge sits. The bridge is also fitted with a camera that allows visitors to interact with the bridge and better interpret the resulting measurements that are captured.
The Outcome
The bridge, frame station, and window facade form a living laboratory for students to collect data from a real-world structure. As the students use this data in their engineering analysis, they can learn how real structures are designed and modeled, and better understand how the structure responds to their interactions with it. Theoretical learning is important and has a critical role to play, but it does not offer the same tactile, hands-on lessons that experiential learning offers.
From first year to fourth year, the IDEAs Clinic is partnering with instructors from across Engineering to create a hands-on journey through increasingly complex activities and workshops. Engineering Design Days and Teamwork Training modules will prepare students from first, second, and third year for their fourth-year design project experiences.
Do you need a solution that can provide better quality data in the lab setting for educational purposes? Let’s meet for a virtual cup of coffee and talk.