The Daily Texan

Texas Student Medi

The Daily Texan

Texas Student Medi

Using Active Learning and Team Competition to Teach Gas Turbine Cycle Design

An elective, Analysis and Design of Propulsion Systems, has been a traditional lecture course teaching gas turbine engines from a design perspective. This past fall semester additional active learning modules were introduced to make the course more interactive. Students formed teams of four and each team was designated a company. The task was to design a replacement engine for the B-52H which served as the basis for learning about gas turbine engine design. The companies picked a name, developed a logo, and wrote a mission statement. Competition was encouraged and the “companies” were tasked to eventually design the lowest cost, most efficient high bypass turbofan engine to replace the existing engine. A three part design project led to a final report on the engine design. To conclude the process, each team presented their engine as if they were a company trying to sell their product to a customer. The customer, the professor, picked an overall winner based on the information presented. Assessment of the course showed that the students appreciated the competitive environment giving them insight into how a gas turbine company, such as Rolls-Royce, GE, or Pratt & Whitney, might operate. In conclusion, the active learning modules and the design project were effective in challenging and exciting the students about the design of gas turbine engines. The company context for teams prepares students for what they might encounter in industry.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Planning Forum Volume 16

Table of Contents: The Naked Practitioner: Participatory Community Development in Peri-Urban Mexico /by Dr. Patricia Wilson (p. 5) -- Skopje, Macedonia, 1965 to 2014: In Search of a Modern European Capital /by Dr. Cynthia A. Lintz and Lauren Bulka (p. 19) -- Preparing Planners for Economic Decline and Population Loss: An Assessment of North American Planning Curricula /by Maxwell Hartt (p. 33) -- Development and Displacement: Single Family Home Demolitions in Central East Austin, 2007 to 2014 /by Sara McTarnaghan (p. 47) -- Imagining Austin: Political Economy and the Austin Comprehensive Plan /by Adam Ogusky (p. 67) -- Piñata Power: Reflections on Race, Love, and Planning /by Elizabeth Walsh (p. 83) -- A Reflection on Exploratory Research in Pointe-Saint-Charles /by Aditi Ohri (p. 91) -- The Neighborhood and the Park: Drumul Taberei, Bucharest /by Maria Alexandrescu (p. 97) -- A Case for Regional Planning in Energy Access Delivery /by Vivek Shastry (p. 101) -- Marketing Magic: The Tourism Ministry’s Pueblos Mágicos Program and Historical Preservation in Mexico /by Gibrán Lule-Hurtado (p. 107) -- The Spectacularization of Urban Development on the Las Vegas Strip /by Kurt Kraler (p. 115) -- Author Biographies (p. 121) -- Acknowledgments (p. 123)Community and Regional Plannin

Top-k Route Search through Submodularity Modeling of Recurrent POI Features

We consider a practical top-k route search problem: given a collection of points of interest (POIs) with rated features and traveling costs between POIs, a user wants to find k routes from a source to a destination and limited in a cost budget, that maximally match her needs on feature preferences. One challenge is dealing with the personalized diversity requirement where users have various trade-off between quantity (the number of POIs with a specified feature) and variety (the coverage of specified features). Another challenge is the large scale of the POI map and the great many alternative routes to search. We model the personalized diversity requirement by the whole class of submodular functions, and present an optimal solution to the top-k route search problem through indices for retrieving relevant POIs in both feature and route spaces and various strategies for pruning the search space using user preferences and constraints. We also present promising heuristic solutions and evaluate all the solutions on real life data.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 table