Teaching Awareness of Problem‐Solving Skills to Engineering Freshmen

Abstract Carnegie Mellon recently introduced a new curriculum that requires each engineering freshmen to elect two introductory engineering courses in the first year. The goal is to expose students to engineering disciplines as well as to engineering methods early. As part of this curriculum, we developed an introductory chemical engineering course to teach problem‐solving skills explicitly within the context of material balances. By surveying students who had as well as students who had not taken the course, we found evidence that the new course was effective in increasing students' awareness of their problem‐solving strategies.