Materials Science and Engineering Educational Advances Workshop

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NON-TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION: Materials science and engineering students are in high demand from industry in areas ranging from steel fabrication to semiconductor manufacturing to advanced composites for automotive and energy generation. Graduates need to be able to use sophisticated tools, think critically and innovatively, and be adaptive to a rapidly changing world. Now is the time for the materials research and education community to explore advances in pedagogy, effective learning principles, and educational content delivery to better serve students. While the primary focus of this workshop is undergraduate materials degree programs and introductory materials courses used by a wide range of science and engineering majors, community college and graduate education is also being addressed. This workshop is identifying the current best practices in providing innovative and inclusive teaching methods and tools. The results, distributed through a consensus report, will better prepare science and engineering college graduates for using modern tools across all materials science and engineering industry sectors.TECHNICAL DETAILS: The workshop brings together leaders and practitioners from the broadly defined materials research and education field for a two-day workshop to share new innovations in educational content delivery to impact the widest range of students possible. The workshop includes demonstrations of new online learning modules, the incorporation of computational simulation tools into both lectures and labs, and the addition of active learning and entrepreneurship components to the curriculum to foster a more inclusive student body and workforce of the future. The workshop"s focus is on how these innovations are implanted in the materials curriculum at the college level, and builds on prior meetings that helped shape the continuously evolving content in materials courses across several science disciplines. The organizers, drawn primarily from an international organization of university materials science and engineering department chairs, are committed to ensuring attendees represent all sectors and dimensions of the materials research and education community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.