SES 292 & 492 – Inquiry Based Methods
I work to empower my students to take control of their own education – that’s what they’ll have to do when they’re out of school and working in our communities. I am a proponent of interdisciplinary learning, which I have found can be done best through inquiry-based learning methods. In inquiry-based learning, students engage in individual research and then come together in groups for long-duration discussions on their research findings. In inquiry-based learning we teach students how to formulate a question, how to perform a literature search, how to best disseminate information, and other skills useful to modern engineering product development. Students often create large thought maps on the white board or draw interconnected diagrams to connect each other’s thoughts and research findings to solve a problem or answer a question. When I have co-taught inquiry classes in the past, they have included students from a variety of different backgrounds, from political science to physics, philosophy to art history. I believe that inquiry-based learning methods are well-suited for large hands-on based projects within an engineering department.
Spring 2021: “Is there life on icy moons and how can we detect it?”
This semester focused on answering the above “Big Goal Question” (BGQ) in an online-only format due to COVID. To start off, the class read a paper supplied by one of the course instructors, the paper was “On the Habitability and Future Exploration of Ocean Worlds” by K.P Hand et al., Space Sciences Review (2020). Students came to class having read the paper, then split into groups for discussion and to come up with Natural Next Questions (NNQs), they then put their NNQs up on the Miro board and the class voted which NNQ to follow for the next class period. For the NNQ, the students had to run individual literature searches to find a paper that was related to answering the NNQ. The next course period, students split into groups to discuss their papers, then came up with their own group NNQs. The cycle then repeats until a few class period later where the students perform a distillation (like a mind-map) of their papers and NNQs related to the BGQ on the Miro boards. These distillations help to paint a bigger picture than can help to answer the BGQ. Below is an example of students voting on an NNQ.
Fall 2021: “How can we create or improve the human future in space, informed by the Star Trek media franchise?”
This semester focused on answering the above “Big Goal Question” (BGQ) in an in-person format in a newly renovated classroom designed specifically to facilitate Inquiry-Based Learning. The same iterative learning process takes place for this course, but in person learning allows for students to immediately hop up from the groups to draw on the white boards available in the room (all the walls are covered in magnetic whiteboards). This course was especially interesting to teach, the course was mixed graduated and undergraduate level with varying disciplines represented from philosophy PhDs to mechanical engineering, from political science to astrophysics PhDs. We included guest speakers on some days to give students exposure to field experts, including law professors specializing in international relations to working professionals at the Smithsonian. This course used Star Trek episodes combined with rigorous published academic papers to spark creative and out-of-the-box thinking for solutions to the BGQ. Dr. Dave Williams was the lead instructor for this course and is a living encyclopedia of Star Trek knowledge, he was an absolute delight to teach this class with.
As of AGU 2023, I’ve been given the blessing from Dave to teach this course as an elective at CU. I’ll attempt to broach this topic in the next few months to see how it can fit into the CU Space Minor.