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Integrating “Impacts of Covid-19 pandemic on air quality” in STEM courses and internships for undergraduate students
129th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Excellence Through Diversity, ASEE 2022 ; 2022.
Article in English | Scopus | ID: covidwho-2046214
ABSTRACT
Air pollution is a global public health concern and has led to millions of premature deaths worldwide. In overpopulated cities, particulate matter such PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone (O3) in the troposphere have deleterious effects on human health leading to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The students in two undergraduate courses (Principles of Biology for Honors students and Ecology) and one graduate course (Teaching STEM at the K-12 schools) at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore;and summer-exchange undergraduate engineering interns learnt about the positive and negative effects of Covid-19 pandemic on air quality for some of the selected overpopulated cities in the world that witnessed lockdowns from March 2020 through spring 2021. The STEM students as well as the interns had the opportunity to learn how to analyze the real-time and historical air quality data from the Environmental Protection's Agency's centralized data system, AirNow, as well as from the Air Quality Open Data Platform (https//aqicn.org/data-platform/covid19) Worldwide Covid-19 dataset. For the above-mentioned courses, the materials pertaining to Covid-19 and air quality were taught in the form of modules (two for each course) with lectures;discussions and class debates;video materials;simulations with real-time data;and a project centering on that theme. The engineering students who worked as summer interns worked on analyzing data from five of the major cities in the world. Besides analyzing the effects of the pandemic on PM2.5, NO2, and O3 in the selected populated cities, the students also studied whether any correlations existed among the air quality parameters or not. The students' learning outcomes included honing content knowledge in atmospheric chemistry and physics of particulate matter;environmental sciences and engineering;public health and policies;research skills with respect to data analysis and problem-solving;as well as presentation and writing skills. The students and interns in the courses and internships also addressed and debated on the various issues of sustainability, which encompasses social, environmental, economic considerations along with policies. The crisis of the pandemic on climate change is dependent on the policies of the governments towards which directions the economies need to head. When the governments prioritize to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy such as wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, then the mitigation efforts of climate change could come to fruition. It is anticipated that with more ongoing collaborations across disciplines, the authors will be able to permanently integrate these diverse components in other STEM courses such as Statistics for Engineers, Big Data Analytics, and enhance multidisciplinary learning for all majors. This integration of research findings in STEM courses is a reflection of the KDB (Know, Do, Be) framework, as the interns and the students honed their skills not only in content knowledge through inquiry, but felt responsible in taking action towards mitigation efforts of climate change. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
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Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: Scopus Type of study: Experimental Studies Language: English Journal: 129th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Excellence Through Diversity, ASEE 2022 Year: 2022 Document Type: Article

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Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: Scopus Type of study: Experimental Studies Language: English Journal: 129th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Excellence Through Diversity, ASEE 2022 Year: 2022 Document Type: Article