Pivoting with excellence: Juan Ocampo

Science and Tech
January 08, 2021

Juan Ocampo, Ph.D.  
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Co-Director of the Community for Teaching and Learning  

by Alex Z. Salinas (B.A. ’11, M.A. ’19)

Q: What are some new teaching methods you’ve  gained this year? 

A: Flipping the classroom and asking students to be prepared before they showed up to class so we can use class time for discussions and active learning. I also used Zoom breakout rooms to do project-based learning, which is to give a prompt or an activity to students so they can solve it as a group. They then come back to the main section in Zoom to share their ideas with the whole class. 

Q: What has been your biggestarea for growthin teaching online thus far?   

A: To create assessment activities to better engage my students in an online environment. Some of those activities include coming up with no trivial, or single-solution, design problems, which students will discuss as a group and find the best solution for an engineering problem. For example, I asked my students to design a machine to build tall structures without using a crane using the principles of strength of materials. I was very happy with how creative they were in developing their designs. 

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