Prince George's Community College (PGCC) is creating synchronized first and second year lecture and laboratory courses in engineering, chemistry, physics and mathematics taken by first and second year engineering students. Engineering programs including those at four-year schools are confronted by students requiring substantially more than four years to graduate. Engineering is derived from the two basic sciences of physics and chemistry with the tools provided by mathematics. There is a great deal of shared and mutually supportive materials between subjects. Efficiently providing the basic information is a challenge requiring coordination among the core courses. General Chemistry and other courses are being redesigned to emphasize relevant material for engineering students who are more mathematically and computer sophisticated than others. The advantages of repetition are captured in teaching laboratories, with experiments and hardware and software tools that illustrate the contributions of each field. The project is creating online, free textbooks and laboratory manuals that are available to PGCC students and nationwide. Particularly in the case of chemistry, normal courses assume that students do not know many things that engineering students do, emphasize many things that are superfluous to most engineers, and, because most engineers only take the first semester, leave out important topics such as chemical kinetics and equilibrium. The course assumes that engineering students know a number of topics generally covered in General Chemistry such as SI units, significant figures, logarithms and exponents, etc. Many things that are customarily taught in General Chemistry, such as the old quantum theory are mentioned but not covered, because they will be encountered in General Physics, and Introduction to Engineering. Calculus is a co-requisite so it can be used in General Chemistry, particularly in teaching kinetics and thermodynamics. The new curriculum covers all of the topics taught in the normal two semester General Chemistry course in one semester. The coordinated PGCC engineering and science courses will prepare students for integration into four year programs.

Creating a cohesive community college engineering curriculum

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.