by Mallika Bariya, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 Challenge: In the first fully remote semester of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was a GSI for Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) 45L, a core lab course. Labs revolve around hands-on participation and pose a unique challenge for remote Continue Reading >>
by Panagiotis Zarkos, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2021 There is a palpable excitement in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences 16A classroom as undergraduate freshmen set out to begin their journey in electrical engineering with a rather demanding course that introduces them to modern information Continue Reading >>
by Clarissa Towle, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 Challenge: MSE 45L is an intense materials science laboratory course for which I was a GSI in the Fall of 2017. This was the first university-level class that most of my students had taken, as many of them Continue Reading >>
by Rachael Olliff Yang, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 At the beginning of every class, instructors are faced with the challenge of encouraging participation. I was able to successfully increase class participation using phenomena-based inquiry. In Fall 2018 I co-taught the field section and lab of General Biology Continue Reading >>
by Nicholaus Gutierrez, Rhetoric Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2019 Students in R1B classes are asked to engage in research that involves acquiring relevant information through reliable sources, and to use those sources to produce new knowledge on a given topic. This can be a challenge in the age of Google, Continue Reading >>
by Lora Oehlberg, Mechanical Engineering
I realized that…workshops should be available to students beyond ME290P…because the workshops help students develop marketable skills for careers in design, [so] I initiated a series of User Interface Prototyping Design Clinics that focused on teaching hands-on prototyping skills to communicate design concepts.
by Naomi Kohen, Materials Science and Engineering
In order to make the demos more relevant and interactive for the students, all of the soft material systems examined were food-based…The promise of a lab that yielded edible results provided an effective motivation for the students to stay for the extra credit labs.
by James Su, Vision Science
Once I start hearing “oohs” and “ahas,” I know the students are starting to understand the physical effects of each of the telescope elements. The math comes naturally once the students understand what physically happens to the light rays that are squeezed, expanded, reflected, and bent.
by Daniel Perley, Astronomy
In this case, words and diagrams were the problem, and no amount of them would solve it. My solution, instead, was to produce for my students an animated simulation of the motion of the planets around the sun, and display it on one wall using an LCD projector.
by Jason Ng, Vision Science
I knew that I wanted to strengthen the students’ understanding of the lab material and provide greater clinical relevance…The challenges were to find a way to tie the labs together over the entire semester, and to focus on creating a more direct link between the basic science experiments in the labs and actual clinical patient testing.