Engaging Undergraduate Students in Transportation Studies through Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering Education and Training (STREET)

Chen-Fu Liao, David Levinson and Henry Liu
Additional contact information
Henry Liu: Nexus (Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems) Research Group, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota

No 200910, Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group

Abstract: The practice of transportation engineering and planning has evolved substantially over the past several decades. A new paradigm for transportation engineering education is required to better engage students and deliver knowledge. Simulation tools have been used by transportation professionals to evaluate and analyze the potential impact of design or control strategy changes. Conveying complex transportation concepts can be effectively achieved by exploring them through simulation. Simulation is particularly valuable in transportation education because most transportation policies and strategies in the real world take years to implement with a prohibitively high cost. Transportation simulation allows learners to apply different control strategies in a risk-free environment and to expose themselves to transportation engineering methodologies that are currently in practice. Despite the advantages, simulation, however, has not been widely adopted in the education of transportation engineering. Using simulation in undergraduate transportation courses is sporadic and reported efforts have been focused on the upper-level technical elective courses. A suite of web-based simulation modules was developed and incorporated in the undergraduate transportation courses at University of Minnesota. The STREET (Simulating Transportation for Realistic Engineering Education and Training) research project was recently awarded by NSF (National Science Foundation) to develop web-based simulation modules to improve instruction in transportation engineering courses and evaluate their effectiveness. Our ultimate goal is to become the epicenter for developing simulation-based teaching materials, an active textbook, which offers an interactive learning environment to undergraduate students. With the hand-on nature of simulation, we hope to improve student understanding of critical concepts in transportation engineering and student motivation toward transportation engineering, and improve student retention in the field. We also would like to disseminate the results and teaching materials to other colleges to integrate the simulation modules in their curricula.

Keywords: Transportation Education and Training; Transportation Simulation; Roadway Geometry Design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A23 R41 R42 R48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2109 12-21.

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/179987 First version, 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nex:wpaper:street

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Levinson ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).