Given the opportunity to showcase their creative talents, students express their thoughts with a wide array of visual deliverables as solutions for sustainability problems
During the Fall 2024 term, undergraduate students in Engineering and the School of Environment had a chance to explore their solutions to sustainability problems through telling personal stories and visual representation.
Students were given an assignment and asked to consider at least two pillars of sustainability in their group project, comprising environment, social, economic and professional responsibility – the written portion to be accompanied by a medium of their choice, such as a graphic, video, infographic, comic strip, skit, etc. Further, they were asked to use personal experiences to communicate their submission.
The rationale being that practicing engineers are often required to work in teams and communicate ideas to various stakeholders, at times presenting to stakeholders about ways and means to advance sustainability.
Sometimes changing up the normal academic approach can yield pleasant, and surprisingly imaginative, results. During the first term of the year, CIV300 instructor and alumna Sherry-Ann Ram (CivMin PhD 2T4) did just this and dared to try something different, resulting in delightful visual deliverables from her students. Students were told by Ram, “This is your opportunity to dream big, use your imagination, and come up with novel solutions that may not already exist.”
By changing the format of assignments and tests for the Terrestrial Energy Systems class, she allowed groups of students to explore and express the topic in amazingly diverse ways. “The idea was for students to draw upon personal experience, sustainability pillars and course concepts to come up with solutions to a sustainability issue,” Ram explains.
“I made a shift in the way the students were assessed during the term by having just two closely supervised exams – one as a midterm – and a [larger] group project,” she says, outlining the overall view. “The group project featured diverse student groups of thee to five people, and was comprised of three components: a short written summary, a creative component and a reflection.”
The resulting creative components from the groups yielded impressive work ranging from infographics to comic strips to a story book. The collaborative efforts showcased the students’ thoughts and creative endeavours while still adhering to the desired academic outcomes.
The theme of sustainability is told in several ways, showcasing different cultural experiences. In one way it’s described through the narrative of an annual snowman’s demise in the illustrated story “Snowball” and in another of a girl, Safa, who endures seasonal monsoon flooding in Dhaka and encountering a flood fairy in the story “What Can I Do?” illustrated via an e-book. In a poster format, often seen displayed as a capstone project, another group showed in graphic form their “Mitigating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect” composite.
“I have always enjoyed TAing for CIV300 because it offers some insights into how fundamental algebraic principles, so familiar to engineers, explain global patterns in climate and landscapes,” says the teaching assistant grading the project, PhD student Jay Gordon (BSc 2011). Gordon was quite impressed with some of the creative component outputs, “Now it is pushing further than offering a foundational understanding of Earth’s processes. It is also translating these ideas into an understanding of how we make energy choices – from the obvious utility of oil to the transformations of potential energy required to bring solar, wind and wave energy online.”
Group 25: Poster – Mitigating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect
Kirtan Patel, Sean Shen, Terry Yao and Alp Zeytinoglu
“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.”
~Group 25
Group 30: What Can I Do? online storybook
Hoda Eissa, Izza Farhan, Sharanpreet Ghotra, Rusafa Rahman and Sandhya Sookhoo
“We are grateful to be given an opportunity to display all that we learned. It was a rewarding experience to work in a team with diverse backgrounds and experiences to create our storybook, integrating core course concepts and highlighting the importance of sustainability in the future.”
~Group 30.
Group 31: Snowball comic book
Saffron Brown, Sabryn Di Paola, Lex Piunno and Samantha Troendle
“The creative component of our CIV300 summative assignment was an exceptional educational opportunity because it permitted each of our team members to convey their knowledge and ideas in a way that best suited their communication style. Our team members who had previously struggled with the strict confines of academic communication were able to fully let their ideas shine in the context of this assignment!”
~Group 31.