Initial engineering education in Niigata University. Part 3. On the case of crystal precipitation in aqueous solutions

Abstract

Faculty of Engineering, Niigata University has been executing an initial education program "Breaking Away from Shallow Learning Habits" for first-year students to educate his or her ability to solve problems in engineering fields. In this presentation, we introduce the outline of our approach and the case of one experimental project: crystal precipitation in aqueous solutions. This experiment is so easy to do but makes the students puzzled because they believe 'beautiful' crystals automatically appear without any controlled conditions. They tried to seek the gap between the experimental results and their knowledge and got better results in the second trial. The reports and questionnaire survey proved that this project was highly effective to improve their ability to solve problems and gave them strong motivation to learn.