Individual Fellow Initiatives

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

This initiative has been archived in compliance with University policies and legal requirements related to communications and web presence. If you have questions about this initiative, or any others, please reach out to the Center for Teaching and Learning for more information.

The goal of this project is to train the next generation of environmental engineers in computing and statistical techniques to solve big data problems. Current undergraduate students in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering have little to no exposure to computational and statistical methods for data analysis (e.g., big data collected from sensor networks). I proposed to integrate computational techniques in several courses throughout the Environmental Engineering Degree.

This project is directed at students with no prior knowledge of computer programming languages. When introducing complex and new skills such as computer programming in a classroom, teachers are often confronted with a lot of worried students and great numbers of very different questions, especially in humanities departments. The lecture setting is not well suited to address the needs of individual students.

This project started out with a simple idea: From my original proposal, we noted that “Current historical timelines are not interactive, nor do they enable students to understand connections between different events. They are good at showing chronology, but are not good at illustrating how specific events are influenced by a whole host of different historical factors.”