Development of an interactive digital tool to encourage active learning in heat transfer.

The purpose of this study was to explore the difficulties that students encountered within a 3rd year Heat Transfer unit delivered to engineering students at the University of Bristol, and to propose a useful teaching intervention to improve student learning. Typically, heat transfer is a difficult topic, with extensive literature confirming common misconceptions at undergraduate level (Thomaz et al., 1995; Reiner et al., 2000; Jasien and Oberem, 2002; Miller et al., 2006; Prince et al., 2012; Yang et al., 2020). Students on the unit were surveyed to gauge their opinions on the difficulty of topics taught within the unit as well as the quality and usefulness of existing resources available for learning. Results from the survey aligned with the literature, confirming that there are difficulties with student learning on the unit.
The study aimed to identify and develop an effective teaching intervention to combat this lack of understanding and improve comprehension within the unit. Student opinion suggested that the addition of interactive simulations to existing teaching materials would be appreciated. The use of similar interactive digital tools, encouraging inquiry-based active learning to combat misconceptions, has already been shown to lead to significant improvement in student conceptual understanding (Laws et al., 1999; Ribando et al., 2004; Prince, Vigeant and Nottis, 2009; Yang et al., 2020). After evaluation of existing interactive digital tools, a new tool was designed, incorporating the best features from existing tools alongside new features relevant to the content of the specific unit being considered. The tool was named the Heat transfer Interactive Learning Tool (HILT).
The HILT was built and then pilot tested by a small group of students who were guided through a series of tasks using the HILT and then surveyed to investigate their experiences. Feedback showed that 80% of students would recommend the tool to someone studying heat transfer, but also identified a number of ideas for improvements and additional features. These ideas were implemented in a further development sprint, and the extended HILT was released to a cohort studying the Heat Transfer unit in 2021/22, with feedback and results from this release to be gathered and duly analysed.