Developing Future Engineers: Case Study on the Incorporation of Sustainable Design in an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum

To better prepare students to tackle the challenges of real-world problems, the authors developed a strategic approach to incorporate sustainable-design principles in the undergraduate curriculum to set a foundation of sustainability on which students could build throughout their academic careers. The plan through the four-year undergraduate curriculum involves creating an awareness of sustainable design in a required freshman introduction-to-design course and describing the science of sustainability and how students can apply sustainability principles in a new required sophomore-level course. The students are then prepared to consider sustainability in their civil engineering technical design courses during the third-year curriculum. In their fourth year, students apply sustainability principles in developing and evaluating design solutions during their senior capstone design course. Assessment of student learning showed improvement in students’ abilities to comprehend principles of sustainable design as set forth during Years 1 and 2, as shown through statistically significant increases in knowledge items for Year 1 and ability items for Years 1 and 2. Additionally, the authors plan to conduct a more detailed assessment of senior design submissions during Year 4 to better measure students’ abilities to apply and evaluate these principles through the design process.