Using Inquiry to Expose Undergraduates to ITS

In our rapidly evolving world, asking the right questions and properly defining problem boundaries is paramount to successful engineering design. These practices are especially vital for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which can address a wide range of transportation problems, but which also can exacerbate these same problems. For example, ITS solutions that address the narrowly defined problem of improving traffic flow in an urban area can lead to more regional sprawl, and therefore more traffic and so on-reinforcing a negative feedback loop with ugly results. If the problem is instead framed as trying to reduce commuting times, entirely different and more sustainable ITS solutions may be found. The best planners proceed with caution to avoid prescribing solutions to perceived problems; instead, they take care to understand challenges to urban mobility and the propagating impacts that different development strategies may have. Genuine inquiry, the act of asking questions, ought to be a foundation of engineering education. Indeed, an accumulating amount of engineering education research makes the benefits of such active learning techniques impossible to ignore. Inquiry-based learning begins by posing questions, problems or scenarios in lieu of simply presenting established facts or portraying an existing path to knowledge. It places students´ questions, ideas and observations at the center of the learning experience. As students engage with challenges and questions, they achieve higher levels of learning-past the stage of memorizing and reciting data-to more sophisticated methods of analysis, synthesis, and application. The instructor´s role is to creatively combine best practices, including explicit instruction, and small-group and guided learning in an attempt to build on students´ interests and ideas, ultimately moving students forward in their paths of intellectual curiosity and understanding. This inquiry-based approach is used to introduce a team- of Clemson students to the principles and applications of ITS in developing nations.