Experiential Learning

Experiential learning experiences provide students with direct experiences, accompanied with a critical reflection. Instructors often select the experiences for students, but then serve as the facilitator when the experience is occurring. These experiences are often conducted in informal education settings and with clubs and organizations, but also have a place in the formal setting.

When using experiential learning with your sutdents consider the following:

What are your learning goals for students?
What knowlege, skills, and/or dispositions do you want your students to gain from this learning experience?
What do you, as the instructor, need to do prior to taking students out into the field?
How will you support students in preparing for their experiential learning opportunity?
How will you support students while they are in the field, learning?
What community connections need to be nurtured to support students?
How will students critically reflect after their experiential learning experience?
How wil you and your students measure growth in learning?
How will students share their learning and/or progress with each other and the community?

Examples of experiential learning include, but are not limited to:

Field Trips
Field Work
Internships
Hands-on Lessons
Laboratories

Feel free to browse different examples of lessons and activities that highlight experiential learning below.

Title

Preview

Labs

A list of labs and their associated directions for the course Exploring Sea, Space & Earth: Fundamentals of Engineering Design
Oral Presentation

Your team will make a presentation to the class on your design ideas and how you plan to construct your vehicle. This presentation should be made in Powerpoint (MAC/Windows) or Keynote (MAC OS) and a PDF should be printed and posted to the course Web site. Each team member should present some aspect of the design.
Lab Notebook Review

Each class member is required to keep an up-to-date design notebook throughout the term. It is a good design practice to carefully document the history of your work. Also, notebooks are required in professional practice.
Problem Set 6: Resource Allocation

The objective of this problem is to allocate agricultural water to maximize profits, subject to environmental constraints.
Problem Set 5: Particulate Transport

In this problem set you will be simulating particulate emissions from a single vehicle moving along a straight road with a cross wind. You will develop a particle tracking model to visualize the particulate plume and to compute atmospheric concentrations.
Problem Set 4: MATLAB Practice

This problem set is designed to give you some practice with MATLAB programming. You should develop your own programs rather than modify those handed out in class. The programming problems given here are based on simplified versions of the Exam 1 problems.
Problem Set 3: Thermal Analysis for a Small House

In this problem set you will be evaluating the energy performance of a house using a MATLAB model you construct. Your model will include heat gains and losses from heat conduction, convection, and radiation as well as heat gains from a thermostatically controlled furnace. You will be examining the effect of changing windows, and other structural components.
Problem Set 2: Species Competition

This problem builds on the class lectures about predator-prey ecosytems. Rather than predation, we consider two similar species competing for a common resource. We use the Lotka-Volterra competition model, which embodies the “competitive exclusion” principle:

"If two competing species coexist in the same niche in a stable environment then one species will eventually crowd out the other.”
Problem Set 1: Salination in Irrigated Agriculture

Modeling activity for the course Ecology II: Engineering for Sustainability.
Field Trip

Field trip resources and information for Introduction to Geology