Conversion of Engineering Thermo and Rocketry Courses to Open Source

This Summer’s project is to make major progress in converting Prof. Spjut's versions of E82 (Chemical and Thermal Processes), E133 (Chemical Reaction Engineering) and E134 (Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics), as well as E178 (High Power Rocketry) to open source or freely available resources. Students during the 2023-2024 academic year reviewed all of the existing videos and the websites and made lists of improvements and changes. They also did draft videos to prototype the process of rewriting and rerecording the videos and revising the websites. This Summer we will finish all of the scripts and storyboards, record many of the videos, finish converting the problem sets and projects to open source and creative commons and do most of the work of revising and editing the websites into near-final form.

The open-source tools for the web and graphics development are primarily Quarto and related tools such as Python, Javascript, and your choice of text editor, with possibly Jupyter.

The conversion of the example and problem-solution software will be/is

• Libre Office for Microsoft Excel,
• NumPy/SciPy for MATLAB,
• FreeCAD for Solidworks,
• DWSIM for PRO/II.

Students are involved in all aspects of this project, from rewriting and creating new scripts, storyboarding, recording and editing the new videos, to being on-camera talent, to rewriting the websites, example, problem sets,  and solutions, to building and flying rockets. Ideally, I would want the interested student to identify which aspects of the project they would most want to work on and which aspects they would most want to avoid.