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My teaching goals are to:

(1) create fun and interactive learning environments

(2) train future engineers with solid and cutting-edge skills

(3) help my students develop learning habits that can benefit their whole career

At McGill, I am currently teaching three courses as will be introduced below

CIVE 546 Structural Design Optimization

Course introduction

In conventional civil or structural engineering curriculums, we have numerous courses that teach the analysis skills of structures with various forms. Meanwhile, our students are often not equipped with the skills to find the appropriate or ‘optimized’ form for the design scenario. Form-finding and structural optimization is a critical and necessary first step since it decides the structural efficiency, economy, and constructability.

Therefore, this course will teach two powerful and widely used techniques: form finding and topology optimization.

(1) in the form-finding module: we teach graphical statics and how to apply graphical statics to find efficient forms for different design cases, including cable-structures, trusses, and shells. Application scenarios include buildings (roof, frame, lateral force-resisting), bridges (truss, cable-stayed, suspension bridges), and stadiums.

(2) in the topology optimization module: we teach the basics of optimization and how to formulate topology optimization problems. Our students will experiment with open-source topology optimization codes as well as topology optimization tools in commercial software.

Interactive projects

This course includes an interactive projects where students can choose one of two different paths:

(1) The students can choose to optimize any structures they wish (even the structure of Poisson negative materials)

(2) The student will optimize structures, fabricate and test the optimize structures under the given loading scenarios (e.g., earthquake using a shake table).

CIVE 207 Solid Mechanics

Course introduction

CIVE 207 is an undergraduate core course that usually attracts 150-200 students from different majors, including Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Materials, and Chemical Engineering.

Teaching Methodology

• Connecting the dots: One of the key differences between an expert and beginner lies in the connectivity level of their knowledge points. Experts can easily identify the underling relationship between different knowledge points and jointly use them, while beginners often treat each knowledge points isolated, which makes them hard to know when and how to use their knowledge. To help our students build their knowledge web and ease the learning process, I help them connecting the dots via different ways:
  • Graphical outline: instead of a conventional outline that lists the topics, I provide a graphical outline that gives out students an overview of the topics covered in a lecture AND their relationship. This way, our students better expect what to come and why we are progressing in these directions.
  • Key concepts: at the end of each lecture, I list the key concepts for our students and ask them to explain and identify the relationship between different key concepts. When appropriate, I also provide a skeleton of concept maps and help our students develop their own.
• In-time feedbacks: Our impression of our understanding can be wrong most of the times. In other words, we may feel that we have understood and mastered a knowledge, while we actually are not. Therefore, it is important to provide assessment at different levels to help our students assess and improve. This is especially critical for CIVE 207 as a core and foundational course. If the students cannot mastered this course well, it will impair their future learning. Therefore, I provide assessments at different levels:
  • In-class assessments: after teaching each concept, I provide in-class assessments in various forms: a quick multiple-choice or true-or-false question or an example calculation. These frequent in-class assessments can help me activate their knowledge and both parties assess their learning in real time.
  • Weekly quizzes: at the beginning of each week, I provide a weekly quiz that examine their understanding of key concepts. The weekly quiz is open-notes and open-textbooks, so the students can use the weekly quiz as a learning opportunity to review and strengthen their learning.
  • Homework and tutorials: homework and tutorials are design to help them apply multiple concepts simultaneously to address complex questions. This help them examine the effectiveness of their understanding and application.
• Hands-on learning: CIVE 207 includes three lab sessions. The students have the opportunity to observe and validate what they learned in class. They will write lab reports to apply their knowledge in analyzing the results.
• Teaching the methodology: very often, our courses teach our students domain-specific knowledge. Very rarely, our courses help our students develop learning methodology, which is actually critical for their success not only in the specific course but also during their entire career. I am actively helping my students identify and develop learning methodology that is suitable for their situation, including but not limited to below
  • Weekly review: very often, the students delay their review until the approaching of exams. Meanwhile, it is usually much more effective to review the class contents immediately after the class (when the memory is still fresh) and summarize the class into a concept map. This way, when the students need to review, they don’t need to go over hundreds of slides, but only need to go over the summary sheets (a few pages) that they summarize in their own way. This can help them better master the knowledge and reduce their review pressure during the exam period.