Conversion of Engineering Thermo and Rocketry Courses to Open Source
This academic year’s project is to complete the conversion of 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, creative commons, and/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. Summer 2024 we finished the two draft videos, recorded footage for several more videos, and created documents explaining the procedures for writing and editing scripts, preparing the materials for recording videos, recording the videos, and editing the videos and submitting to YouTube. We also updated the websites and wrote documents explaining how to edit the website. This year we need to revise the scripts and record the remaining videos (over 100), integrate the videos with the websites, complete the websites, convert the problem sets and projects to open source and creative commons and prepare everything for final release in May 2025.
The open-source and related tools for the web and graphics development are Quarto (which uses Markdown, LaTeX, and Reveal.js syntax), GitHub, and Visual Studio Code with related tools such as Python, Javascript and possibly Jupyter.
The conversion of the example and problem-solution software is:
Libre Office for Microsoft Excel,
NumPy/SciPy for MATLAB,
R and RSTUDIO for MATLAB,
FreeCAD for Solidworks,
DWSIM for PRO/II.
Students are involved in all aspects of this project, from editing and rewriting scripts, storyboarding, recording and editing the new videos, to being on-camera talent, to editing and rewriting the websites, examples, 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. The website has a list of additional materials to submit.
We believe there is a need for instructional materials in Chemical Engineering and high-power rocketry that is freely available, both for those who need supplements to their regular course materials, and for those who are learning on their own. This project is a chance to make a difference for Chemical Engineering students throughout the world, as well as teach rocket hobbyists that flying rockets without instrumentation is just playing around, but launching rocket with instrumentation is rocket science. You will get experience in any aspect of video development, web development, and engineering pedagogy that you desire.