Austin, TX - June 17, 2009

Hundreds discuss EduPack teaching resources at ASEE Meeting

Campus-wide use and eco design are key themes

Granta's CES EduPack created a stir at this week's American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) meeting in Austin, TX. Granta's booth (pictured) was one of the busiest in the conference exhibit, with hundreds of engineering educators visiting to find out about the CES EduPack resources for teaching materials and processes. A Short Course at the meeting, presented by EduPack author Professor Mike Ashby, was attended by faculty from a diverse group of US universities and colleges. At both the conference and the course, there was considerable interest in way that EduPack has developed to support teaching throughout all years of study and across the full range of engineering, design, and science subjects. Teaching of sustainable engineering and eco design was one hot topic area.

Granta's educational team at the ASEE Meeting

A campus resource

CES EduPack is a popular supporting resource for materials-related courses. It includes extensive information and property data on materials and processes, interactive graphing and selection software, lectures, teaching notes, and a novel tool to assess environmental impact. It is now used at over 600 universities and colleges, with a growing number applying it within a materials-spine, design-spine, or sustainability-spine that runs throughout their engineering curriculum.

Many ASEE attendees liked this ability to support teaching across many subject areas and to help departments to present a more integrated and accessible curriculum, as well as supporting individual faculty in developing or enhancing courses. Such breadth comes from the development of EduPack over a number of years to include data and resources covering topics such as polymers, aerospace, architecture, eco design, and bio engineering. EduPack has also been linked to other widely-used resources. For example, it now includes extensive cross-references to commonly used materials texts by Ashby, Callister, Askeland and Phulé, Budinski, and Shackelford, and to online resources such as the ASM International Online Handbooks.

Contest highlights sustainable engineering

One particularly hot subject area at the moment is the teaching of sustainable engineering. A tool to help with teaching of eco design concepts was illustrated through a contest on the Granta booth. The contest asked participants to consider results from an 'eco audit' for a simple product (100 bottles of mineral water) and to correctly place the bars on a graph that shows the CO2 footprint of each stage in the product's life cyce. The correct answer is shown below.

Eco audit - CO2 footprint of 100 bottles of mineral water

The Eco Audit Tool in the CES EduPack software allows users to quickly generate graphs such as the above, and to investigate "what if" scenarios, studying how changes in materials, processes, transport, or end-of-life choices impact the environment.

Congratulations to the winners of the contest on each day. Each receives a copy of Professor Mike Ashby's new textbook, Materials and the Environment:

• Professor Virendra Varma, Missouri Western State University
  
  
• Professor Gene Liao, Wayne State University
  
  
• Mr. Scott Morton, University of Wyoming

Plans for next academic year

Granta was also able to tell visitors about plans for the 2009-2010 academic year. These include the next release of the CES EduPack software, CES EduPack 2010, and more courses and symposia to support the growing community of CES EduPack users worldwide. The first international CES EduPack Symposium brought together over eighty academics from 21 countries to share ideas and discuss their teaching of materials and processes (read a report). Similar events are planned for next year.

If you would like to make suggestions for developments to CES EduPack, or register interest in attending a CES EduPack event in your region, contact us.