Instructor Insights

Course Overview

This page focuses on the course 22.033/22.33 Nuclear Systems Design Project as it was taught by Prof. Michael Short in Fall 2011.

Nuclear Systems Design Project is an intense capstone project course designed primarily for MIT nuclear engineering undergraduates. In this course, students collectively tackle all facets of an open-ended, multi-disciplinary nuclear engineering design challenge.

Course Outcomes

Course Goals for Students

To learn to work on an open-ended, “no right answer” problem that requires choosing design parameters, optimizing them, and defending a proposed design.

Possibilities for Further Study/Careers

Graduate study in nuclear engineering
Careers in nuclear engineering

Instructor Interview

In the following pages, Dr. Short discusses specific aspects of his experience as the course instructor.

Curriculum Information

Prerequisites

For undergraduate (22.033) credit: no prerequisites
For graduate (22.33) credit: 22.312 Engineering of Nuclear Reactors

Requirements Satisfied

Nuclear Science and Engineering degree requirement

Offered

Every fall

Student Information

Enrollment

17 students

Breakdown by Year

A mix of juniors and seniors. Graduate students may enroll, but none did during the Fall 2011 semester.

Breakdown by Major

All Nuclear Science and Engineering majors.

Typical Student Background

Substantial coursework in Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Ideal Class Size

The ideal class size is between 5 and 20. There is no enrollment cap. As the required capstone class for undergraduate NSE majors, the class size is closely tied to the number of juniors and seniors majoring in NSE in any given year. If enrollment were unusually high in a year, the class would be split into two groups that would simultaneously engage in completely independent design projects. With too many students, communication and collaboration become unwieldy.

How Student Time Was Spent

During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:

Lecture

Three class sessions per week, each lasting one hour; 39 sessions total; mandatory attendance
9 lecture sessions, 10 recitations, 11 group work sessions, and 9 project presentation sessions

Out of Class

Activities such as

Background research
Design
Writing
Group meetings
Individual meetings with the instructor
Preparation for presentations

Course Team Roles

Lead Instructor (Dr. Michael Short)

To design the course project, structure and run the course, work with students, and provide feedback. Read more about Dr. Short’s role in guiding students through each phase of the course.

Teaching Assistant

To serve as a second instructor, particularly during group work sessions, and to provide and work through examples with students.
To bring the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program into the course by teaching students about engineering leadership, including how to lead and organize a project, how to work with all different types of people, how to budget time, and how to develop a backup plan.

In this section, Dr. Short discusses how he chose the project for the class. He also gives some examples of projects explored during past offerings of the course.

Project Selection

Each year, the class takes on a different overall course project. It can range from something that’s been topical in the news to just an idea that the instructor came up with.

"The hardest part of developing the project assignment is finding a project that every student can contribute to, learn from, and care about."

— Dr. Short

The process of choosing a project isn’t as simple as finding an interesting problem. In the Nuclear Science and Engineering department, students are typically on one of three tracks: the fission track; the fusion track; or the nuclear science and technology track, which can range anywhere from materials science to quantum computing to safety, security, and proliferation. The hardest part of developing the project assignment is finding a project that every student can contribute to, learn from, and care about. Many projects would have been interesting to some students but not interesting to others. The project also had to be doable in a 13-week semester.

Before the Fall 2011 semester, we had a brainstorming meeting in the department to discuss possible topics for design courses. Ideas ranged all the way from designing a test reactor for testing new types of fuel to designing a robot to go in and clean up the Fukushima incident.

In the end, the project I settled upon for this class was the design of a combined nuclear reactor/biofuel system. There had been a number of recent studies about coupling nuclear to other energy sources, and I thought it would be a great way to highlight other ways nuclear power can be cleanly used on a large scale. Most folks tend to think of it as just for electricity, but this example highlighted making heat as well.

This project involved a huge range of topics, from chemical to nuclear to mechanical to fluid engineering. For the fission people, there was a core to design and there was a reactor around it. For the fusion people, there were lots of materials issues at very high temperatures. For the safety and security people, there was the safety and security of the material in your plant. For the materials science people, things are made out of materials, so there was a lot to attack there. There was something for everybody.

Projects from Other Semesters

Some examples of projects undertaken in other iterations of Nuclear Systems Design Project are

Use of a fusion reactor for transmutation of nuclear waste;
Design and implementation of an experiment to predict and measure pebble flow in a pebble bed reactor (project description (PDF)); and
Development of a mission plan for a manned Mars mission, including the conceptual design of a nuclear powered space propulsion system and power plant for the Mars surface, a lunar/Martian nuclear power station, and the use of nuclear plants to extract oil from tar sands.

In this section, Dr. Short discusses his role throughout the different phases of the course, as well as the challenge of helping students tackle the project without telling them what to do.

In a project-based course, the instructor’s job, in my opinion, is to be a guide and a mentor through the problem. You have to know things like how to push students in the right direction and what information not to give them. You have to be smart about giving students challenges that they can conquer. You also need to fill in any technical gaps in the students’ knowledge, one student at a time.

Ideally, the instructor would have done problems like this before but not this particular one. In fact, it helps if the instructor hasn’t solved this one before. It’s critical that the instructor not inject personal bias into the solution. The more the students “own” the problem and the solution, the more personally motivated they will be.

My role as the instructor changed as the course progressed through its four main segments: four weeks for the problem survey, four weeks for nitty gritty technical analysis, four weeks for project integration, and a final week for the final report and presentation. For more information about each segment of the course, please refer to the course syllabus.

Weeks #1–4: Introductory Talks, Major Design Choices

In the first month of class, my job was to show students the field, including some of the relevant work that has already been done. I gave each sub-team one or two carefully chosen references that gave good surveys of each of the sub-topics in the problem, and that included references that would lead the students to more concrete details about each sub-problem.

In that way, we started showing them in a certain direction. I tried to get the momentum moving quickly in this first segment in order to set the tone for the rest of the course. We set a lot of concrete requirements week by week in the course: written reports about the references, progress reports about the groups’ efforts, plans for next steps, and so on. Setting those concrete interim goals helped set the concrete goals of the course.

Weeks #5–8: Research, Design, and Optimization

In the second month of the course, which focused on technical analysis, my job was both to guide them in their analysis of the problem and to fill in any gaps in their technical knowledge. No student is going to know everything going into the course. That’s not expected at all. But, they have to know enough to solve the problem, so it was my job to identify each student’s knowledge gaps as well as approaches for filling them. To do that, I had individual meetings with each student during the course to check: What are you doing now? What do you find easy? What do you find hard? Are there any bits and pieces that you need explained in a different way?

Weeks #9–12: Fine Tuning, Secondary Concerns

In the final month of work, a lot of class periods started out with diagramming the whole system, putting in key numbers, and evaluating the design as a whole. For the rest of class, the TA and I would check in with each group of students and ask questions like, “Where are you on this part of the problem? Do you guys know that Team B has a different number than you guys do?”

We helped them work together and bring different parts of the design together. It was sort of constant guidance and supervision. We had to know what everyone was doing and point them to talk to the right people. We also helped to maintain the momentum of the students. Their energy varied a lot over the semester, often from outside factors. We tried to keep that from affecting the students’ performance in this course.

Week #13: Final Report and Presentation

The final week was devoted to the final report and presentation. These are described in the Teaching Communication page.

In this section, Dr. Short shares some of his approaches for making this nuclear design class more tangible for his students.

I would say that no matter how theoretical and abstract the course, you can always put up a tangible physical to anything you’re teaching. Here are some examples of how I made the subject matter more tangible for my students.

Using Reactor Parts as Pointers

I’m not a big fan of laser pointers, and my students hadn’t necessary touched any part of a reactor in their entire lives, so we’re graduating all these Bachelors’ in nuclear engineering without having touched pieces of a reactor.

So each day, I used a different piece of a reactor as a pointer. One day, I used a zirconium fuel rod. The next day I used a steam generator tube, and so on, and passed them around at the end of the class. I’d say, “Oh, by the way, today’s pointer is a zirconium fuel rod. Pick it up. Notice how much lighter it is than steel. Try bending it. Notice how strong it is.”

And just putting a tangible spin on something as abstract as designing a reactor on paper really helped students grasp it, get excited about it, and absorb the information.

Involving Students in Hands-On Experiences

Hands-on demos are key too. When we were talking about metallurgy, students were looking at things like quenched and tempered and annealed steel, which are different heat treatments you can do to increase strength or increase hardness at the cost of other things.

You can talk about it and teach it, the theory in its entirety on paper, or you can do what we did – go down to the blacksmith’s forge, heat up some metal, and tell the students, “Alright, break it in half.” And then heat it and quench it in water and say, “Alright, break it in half,” and then it snaps. And then heat it slowly and say, “Break it in half,” and the strongest student can’t even make it budge. That’s the tangible analogue and the intuitive learning that students need to get no matter how theoretical the course.

Teaching Material Science with an Analogy: Cheese

One of my favorite moments – and I’m guessing it was also one of the students’ favorite moments – was the cheese-tasting class that I taught. For the students that decided to stick it out until the day before Thanksgiving – which was, by the way, a school day – I taught a course on cheese tasting and linked every cheese that we tasted to a phenomenon that happens in materials science and metallurgy. Not all of these students had been required to take a materials science course, but they needed to understand the behavior of reactors in order to design the reactor.

I had gone to a cheese tasting event, totally separately, and while the instructors were waxing on about how the cheese was made and why it was aged in this cage and how the soil in the air changed things, I was pulling them apart, crumbling them in my hands, making a giant mess, thinking, “These things behave just like metals at high temperatures under irradiation.” So, I set up a cheese tasting class where we tasted five different cheeses, each of which exhibited a metallurgical property.

For example, to teach them about the granular structure of metals, we talked a little about cheddar cheese, because if you break real cheddar cheese apart, it actually fractures on the curd, so curds in cheese are like grains in metal, and there are grain boundaries or curd boundaries. That helped the students understand key ideas. What are grains? How can they fail? Do they always break through the grains, or do the break around the grains?

For things like void swelling and 3D defects under irradiation, we looked at a truffle-flecked cheese, where the truffles simulated foreign body inclusions in the metal, and we actually fabricated tensile samples out of this truffle-flecked cheese. I asked the students to pull them apart, and every single student’s piece of cheese either failed on a truffle, which simulates a third body inclusion, or on a bubble, which simulates a void in the material. So that’s how we taught them about stress concentrators. And that knowledge actually made it through into their final report, which tells me they got the intuition out of that class.

In this section, Dr. Short describes one of the unusual challenges of teaching a course like 22.033: the topics students most needed to learn couldn’t be planned in advance, but instead emerged throughout the semester, making it impossible to plan what he would teach more than a week ahead of time. He then gives some examples of methods he employed to address this challenge.

"I had to constantly figure out what they’d done, where they were going, how to best guide them, which questions to actually answer, and which questions would simply push them in the right direction."

– Dr. Short

Each year’s project is different, so each class’s instructor pretty much has to start from scratch. There’s an enormous amount of preparation involved. In designing the problem, I gave the students just enough constraints that they wouldn’t be standing in a wide open field asking, “Where do I go now?” With such an open-ended problem came open-ended questions and open-ended solutions.

I learned very quickly that I couldn’t even prepare a week ahead of time for this course. I started by spending 20 hours preparing 2 hours of lectures ahead of time, for the first few weeks. By the time class came around, the students would have gone down a different path and had questions on something else. Sometimes students would ask things that I would not expect at all. I learned to prepare two days ahead of time and respond to the students’ requirements. I had to constantly figure out what they’d done, where they were going, how to best guide them, which questions to actually answer, and which questions would simply push them in the right direction. I pretty much prepared myself to meet the needs of the students as they evolved.

Strategies to Learn About Individual Students

Throughout the semester, I used several strategies to learn about each of my 17 students’ individual backgrounds, goals, and needs. This understanding enabled me to tailor the course to meet students’ evolving needs.

Some strategies I used include

Individual meetings. We scheduled individual meetings so that I could get to know every student on a personal level. I felt that was required. If I was going to fill in the gaps in my students’ knowledge, and I was going to help them become more effective engineers in the ways they wanted to be, then I needed to know about them. Why were they in engineering? Why were they taking the course? Why did they choose nuclear engineering? What did they want to do in life? Then, I could tailor the instruction for each student within the frame of reference of what they wanted to get out of the course and out of their education.
Journals. Individual journal communications were essential. Through the journals, I got to know every student’s writing style. I got to know which parts of the problem they understood well and which parts they didn’t understand as well, and I got to work with them to tackle their individual issues.
Ongoing communication. I kept in constant contact with my students. I frequently e-mailed them with previews and follow-ups on class discussions, ideas, reminders, and updates (see a sample of course announcements). I gave the students my cell phone number and they could text me with questions and ideas. Likewise, if I thought of something to solve their problem and it was Saturday night, I could just text them if they’d given me their number.

Preparing Lectures

A lot of my lecture preparation time was spent sitting upside down on the couch at home, thinking, “What am I going to tell these kids in a couple of days?” or, sometimes, in 12 hours. A lot of times, it just takes a lot of thinking. You’ve got to think through, okay, where are they now? Where were they a week ago? A month ago? Where do I want them to be in 24 hours? In a week? In a month? So I’d say half my time was spent sitting and thinking, jotting down notes on paper, crumpling them up, and throwing them over my shoulder.

Most of the rest of my time was spent on preparing lecture notes or class examples to work through. So that would be actually creating a problem, solving it in an instructive manner, and thinking about how I could explain every little piece in every step. And a lot of time actually goes into preparing the slides. I’ve had a number of courses as a student where I couldn’t focus on the material because it felt like the instructor didn’t think twice about his slides. I spent a lot of time crafting the slides to make sure the students could focus on the material and not on the way they were presented. My wife helped me a ton with visual impact and organization, too.

I’ve experienced this same sort of dynamic nature in the start-up companies that I’ve been involved in, where everything changes day by day, and you can make a 180 degree turn at the end. If you find a mistake in your design, you have to propagate it through. While teaching this course was undoubtedly demanding, it was also exhilarating. I love doing design, and I love teaching design. The dynamic nature of the course really added to the excitement of teaching it. I loved helping students understand topics and figuring out new ways to teach things on the fly.

In this section, Dr. Short explains how the course was structured to help students develop their professional communication skills.

"You can have a great design and you can put it out there, but if people can’t absorb it, it might as well not exist."

– Dr. Short

Strong oral and written communication skills are essential to being an effective engineer. Engineers give presentations and they write reports, and people need to be able to easily absorb what’s in both of those things. You can have a great design and you can put it out there, but if people can’t absorb it, it might as well not exist. Some of the students in this class may end up giving professional talks, and some of them may end up as faculty members themselves. An engineer is both a problem solver and a communicator, and one or the other doesn’t cut it. It has to be both.

Students in the Nuclear Systems Design Project class honed their communication skills by writing and presenting about their work in the class.

Ongoing Opportunities for Communication

One thing that I did in this course that hadn’t always been done in the past, which I think was absolutely essential, was to have regular scientific communication from the students in both oral and written form.

Monthly progress report presentations: Each month, I had every student team of 3-4 people present a 20-minute progress report on what they had done so far as a team. That required them to talk about the background of the problem, the background of their sub-problem, how they solved it, where they were going, and how it meshed in with the rest of the design. They had to work together and actually communicate orally. We would nit-pick the heck out of them. In fact, I had the students evaluate each other, and oftentimes their ratings of each other were a lot lower than my ratings of them. I don’t know why, but they were each others’ best critics.
Monthly short journal communications: Students were also required to submit monthly short journal communications on the work that they specifically had done, in the style of a scientific paper. A lot of students had never written papers or journal communications before. They had to read through examples, which they had to do anyway for the problem, and get their journal entries into that formal scientific writing style.

End-of-Term Opportunities for Communication

At the end of the course, we had the students assemble a final report and give a presentation as an entire group. This required them to put together not just a 4-page journal communication like they’d been doing, but a 150-page document detailing every aspect of their design. They had to describe the problem, explain why it was worth solving, talk about its relevance, explain their solution, prove that their solution was a good one, and describe next steps.

One of my favorite parts of the class was the combination of their dress rehearsal and final presentation. For the dress rehearsal, we held a late night pizza event where we had the students go through their entire final presentation, and I brought in a friend who works at a commercial nuclear plant to tear them to shreds. If they were going to be torn to shreds, I wanted it to before they were in front of a public audience.

When they gave their final presentation, it was fantastic, and I attribute that partly to the reaming we gave them a couple days before and partly to their perseverance all the way to the end. They really got everything together and made sure that not only was their technical information was in line, but the way they presented it, the way they organized the information on the slides, and the way they tag teamed the presentation, all of that was really great. This showed me that they didn’t just learn to put facts together. They actually learned how to communicate the information effectively.

Nuclear Systems Design Project is intended to bring students from a classroom mindset to the practical reality of working as an engineer. In this section, Dr. Short shares some of the engineering lessons his students learned.

Preparing Students for Careers in Engineering

This course serves as a bridge between single-subject content courses and students’ future careers as engineers. In single-subject courses, students are expected to master specific content and methods, thereby developing critical background for their future careers as engineers. Most often, these courses consist of lectures, problem sets, and exams. This course pushes students to apply and integrate that accumulated background, and it immerses students in engineering in the full sense of the word.

"This is a new experience for most students … It’s demanding, eye-opening, and exhilarating."

— Dr. Short

Students go through the engineering design process from start to finish. They search the literature, form and pursue original ideas, integrate and apply their knowledge, examine technical details, experience the complexities of engineering design, communicate and collaborate with each other, and communicate their final design in both oral and written form. Through experience, they learn a range of skills that are critical to their future success as engineers.

This is a new experience for most students, and the project is probably bigger than anything they’ve done yet. It’s demanding, eye-opening, and exhilarating. Students have worked together on problem sets before, but they don’t know what working together means on a huge project like this — and that’s where the fun comes in. Students need a course like this to fully prepare for careers in engineering.

I took this course as an undergrad at MIT, and I had a blast. It was the first time that a course didn’t mean you show up, you listen to lectures, you do problem sets, and you go home. This was, you get 13 weeks. Put something together that’s supposed to take a year to design. Go do it. The clock is ticking.

Students learned a range of lessons about engineering through this class. Here are two specific examples.

Engineering Lesson #1: The whole project is linked; an issue in one part will propagate all through the project.

In this class, students worked in two teams on the project. One team designed a part of the project that produced hydrogen, while the other team designed a part of the project that produced biofuels. The link between them was the amount of hydrogen being supplied to the biofuels plant. In one instance, when teams were putting things together, they were off by a factor of 10. It’s no big deal, right? It’s just an extra 0. It turned out to be a huge deal because the hydrogen production plant then had to scale up their process by a factor of 10, requiring a lot more energy from the reactor and hence much bigger piping from the process heat group.

In other cases, one thing would go wrong all the way at the end point of the design and the changes propagated all the way to the beginning. Students would then have to change the coolant they were using, or the power level of the reactor, or some other part of the design, because of something way downstream on the design.

In any place where the two teams didn’t mesh together, the issue propagated through the entire project and the whole team felt the effect. That’s where the frustration and the eventual learning of how to collaborate came in. I don’t think they could have learned these lessons without the frustration.

Engineering Lesson #2: Optimization requires many iterations.

One of the things students found surprising about this class was how many times they had to revisit the same work and the same problem. Part of that came from working together and making sure everyone’s work was in line, and part of that was that if you have something this big, it has a lot of components. It’s not just a problem set with an answer or an end-of-the-year design project where you design a small device and either it works or it doesn’t.

With a design project, there’s no real way to say that you’ve done it better than anyone else could have. By the end of the course, the students had analyzed all the requirements and compared the design requirements with customer requirements. They could look at a set of possible solutions and explain which were better in which situations, for what reasons, and by how much. They had to get an efficient solution, a solution that they would be willing to get up on stage and defend. That’s getting a deep understanding of the problem, not just solving the problem.

I think students are often surprised to find that when they have everything designed, they’re not even close to done. Then there’s optimization and proving and re-optimization and re-proving and cross-checking, and there’s a lot more work that goes into it once you’re “finished.”

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Course Info

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Nuclear Systems Design Project

Course Overview

Course Outcomes

Course Goals for Students

Possibilities for Further Study/Careers

Instructor Interview

Curriculum Information

Prerequisites

Requirements Satisfied

Offered

Student Information

Enrollment

Breakdown by Year

Breakdown by Major

Typical Student Background

Ideal Class Size

How Student Time Was Spent

Lecture

Out of Class

Course Team Roles

Lead Instructor (Dr. Michael Short)

Teaching Assistant

Project Selection

Projects from Other Semesters

Weeks #1–4: Introductory Talks, Major Design Choices

Weeks #5–8: Research, Design, and Optimization

Weeks #9–12: Fine Tuning, Secondary Concerns

Week #13: Final Report and Presentation

Using Reactor Parts as Pointers

Involving Students in Hands-On Experiences

Teaching Material Science with an Analogy: Cheese

Strategies to Learn About Individual Students

Preparing Lectures

Ongoing Opportunities for Communication

End-of-Term Opportunities for Communication

Preparing Students for Careers in Engineering

Engineering Lesson #1: The whole project is linked; an issue in one part will propagate all through the project.

Engineering Lesson #2: Optimization requires many iterations.

Course Info

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