Positioning Engineers for Urban Sustainability Transition Strategy Development

土木工程和建筑工程专业的学生必须学会部署可持续的系统，以平衡经济、社会、政治和社区方面的考虑，以及技术方面的考虑，以解决美国日益衰落的基础设施问题。目前正在为高年级本科生制定一个可持续的以城市基础设施为重点的基于项目的学习(PBL)课程框架：(I)通过跨学科咨询将低年级本科生纳入其中，以便将多个工科本科核心课程中的可持续发展概念联系起来；(Ii)培养研究生领导本科生团队的研究工作；(Iii)将地区/城市政策和决策者纳入学生将面临的经济、社会、政治和技术考虑之中；以及(Iv)创建一个知识中心，供其他教育工作者和研究人员获取有关该项目的信息，以便在各自的大学实施该框架，并为社区建设做出贡献。该项目正在评估通过PBL将可持续发展的概念整合到现有的本科土木和建筑工程课程中是否有助于提高基于团队的解决问题的技能，以及上下两科本科生在多门课程中的合作是否能提高学生将入门课程中教授的概念应用于未来课程的能力。使用真实的城市可持续发展问题加强本科土木和建筑工程课程中课程和级别之间的联系，使学生更好地掌握解决可持续发展问题的相互竞争的制约因素。评估可持续工程问题的学生将意识到部署可持续基础设施时的多方面限制，并更好地平衡国家未来的需求。最终，该框架可以在其他大学的本科工程课程中实施，并有可能为可持续工程教育提供一个模板课程结构。

Civil and construction engineering students must learn to deploy sustainable systems that balance economic, social, political, and community considerations, in addition to technical considerations in order to address America's declining infrastructure. A sustainable urban infrastructure-focused project-based learning (PBL) course framework for upper-division undergraduates is being developed that: (i) incorporates lower-division undergraduates through cross-course consultation to link sustainability concepts across multiple engineering undergraduate core courses; (ii) trains graduate students to lead teams of undergraduates in their research efforts, (iii) incorporates regional/city policy and decision makers to ground students in the economic, social, political, and technical considerations they will face; and (iv) creates a knowledge hub for other educators and researchers to access information about the project to implement the framework at their own universities, and to contribute to community building. The project is evaluating whether integrating sustainability concepts through PBL into existing undergraduate civil and construction engineering courses results in improvements in team-based problem-solving skills and whether collaborations between upper and lower division undergraduates in multiple courses improve students' ability to apply concepts taught in introductory courses to future courses.Using authentic urban sustainability problems reinforces the links among courses and levels within the undergraduate civil and construction engineering curriculum so that students have a stronger grasp of the competing constraints in sustainability problem solving. Students who have assessed sustainable engineering problems become aware of the multifaceted constraints when deploying sustainable infrastructure and are better equipped to balance the future needs of the country. Ultimately, this framework can be implemented in undergraduate engineering curriculum at other universities and has the potential to provide a template course structure for sustainable engineering education.