Category: Teaching Innovations

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Today was the last day of class/ final presentations day for our First Year Engineering Design section! It was the first time I taught first year design, and the whole thing was an experiment: 5 teams working on different building systems (energy, water, food/garden, indoor environmental quality, and transportation/equity for a community resilience hub in…

2026 Senior Design presentations reflect sustainability efforts in the CAEE department

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in News and Updates, Teaching Innovations

I’m so incredibly proud of the senior design teams who presented at the Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering at Drexel University poster event today! This is one of the most rewarding parts of the job to me. Watching their growth is priceless! And our students keep raising the bar every year. This year, one of…

ENGR 113 students play Daybreak: A climate change board game

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Dr. Cruz Rios introduced Daybreak, a collaborative Climate Change game, to the First-Year Engineering Design classroom! Watch the video here “This game showed me how [in] real life it is important to have everyone on the same page. Even if one country is doing something to help fix the issue and all the other countries…

Dr. Cruz Rios’s innovative learning activities are featured in Drexel social media

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What a fun start of the Spring term! I confess that I was nervous because I had no idea how first-year engineering students would react to the idea of a collage workshop, but they really surprised me in the best way! In our ENGR113 (first year engineering design) session, students will design a climate resilience…

Annual AE 444 field trip: 2025 edition

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Field trip to a #LEEDPlatinum, #WELLcertified building right next to our campus. Students had the opportunity to see first-hand several of the high-performance building systems (even beyond the envelope — because everything is connected) we’ve talked about in class. Green roof, rainwater collection and storm water management, biophilia, hydronic systems, electrochromic glass panels, IAQ controls……

AE 444 students develop systems thinking skills for building envelope design

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AE 444 (building envelope systems) students presented the first deliverable of their class project: a building envelope redesign. Using their junior design or an existing building as starting point, they propose strategies to improve the envelope performance. The first deliverable guides them through a few analyses to culminate in their redesign goals to be carried…

Marc Brune (PAE) teaches guest lecture at AE 444

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Our Drexel University School of Engineering ‘s architectural engineering students enjoyed two outstanding guest lectures during the past couple of weeks! I’d like to thank Marc Brune, PE from PAE who just gave an inspiring presentation on their developer-led Living Building. Students saw how it was possible, feasible, and financially sound to build with environmentally…

CIRCLE lab PhD Student Mohsen Bahmanyar presents on resilient design for extreme climates at AE444

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At Building Envelope Systems we had the pleasure of having Mohsen Bahmanyar, our new PhD student at CIRCLE lab, present on resilient design for extreme climates! He showed us a project of his own, a building in the desert of Iran, and how he incorporated passive heating and cooling strategies like thermal mass, courtyards, earth…

AE 444 students create infographics on passive cooling strategies

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Another infographic round, this one for passive cooling strategies! Architectural engineering students at Drexel University School of Engineering read the recent article Cooling People, Not Spaces (available below) and each created an infographic on one of the cooling strategies illustrated in the article. Passive heating and cooling strategies are increasingly important to create sustainable, resilient…

AE 444 students create infographics on innovative smart materials for building envelopes

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