by Riva Bruenn, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Plant morphology is a well-organized catalog of vegetative form. Every week students have dozens of plants to illustrate, interpret, and describe in lab, and even more material to cover and review in discussion. In order to finish the Continue Reading >>
by Ko-Ay Timmy Siauw, College of Engineering
E7 students…spend a great deal of time on their homework but have very little to show for it at the end of the week…I recognized a teaching problem that could be remedied, and thus I created a solution that would allow..students to learn MATLAB in a fun — yet challenging — environment: the E7 Robot Tournament.
by Wendy Sinek, Political Science
I have my students play “Political Challenge,” an interactive game that I designed…During the course of the game, teams debate possible approaches to a question, and then explain the material in their own words in order to earn points. Harder questions are not only worth more points, they also require more active participation, such as staging a mini role-play or debate.
by Mathew Wedel, Integrative Biology
The most serious problem I encountered was the tendency of students to skip the lectures. Many students assumed that that they could get all the information they needed in lab or discussion sections, or by reading the textbook on their own time… I needed a way to encourage students to attend lecture, something that did not rely on the nebulous threat of poor performance on future exams.
by Eric Masanet, Mechanical Engineering
This approach — called design-for-environment — has gained significant momentum worldwide and is an invaluable skill for UCB design engineering students to acquire…I was therefore surprised to learn…that design-for-environment was not being taught as part of UCBs undergraduate design curriculum, nor was it even introduced as an important concept to the design students. To address this problem, I initiated, developed and presented a comprehensive design-for-environment lecture that has since become a regular feature in the ME 110 course.