Engaging Students in an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Course

The components of the undergraduate course in Design of Foundations in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (CEE) at Christian Brothers University (CBU) are discussed.The course consists of the following: classroom lectures, project case studies, failure case studies, ethical case studies and open-ended design problems.Examples of case studies with discussion questions are provided in this paper. Undergraduate CEE Program at CBUChristian Brothers University is a small Catholic university.The School of Engineering offers degrees in electrical, mechanical, chemical and civil and environmental engineering.The CEE program requires studies in structural, soil, traffic and transportation, hydraulics and water resources in addition to other courses in physics, chemistry, mathematics and the liberal arts.Only the courses in the geotechnical sequence are described here.Three required courses are offered in geotechnical engineering (geotechnical engineering, geotechnical engineering laboratory and design of foundations) along with elective courses.In the first two courses, students learn the fundamentals and in the third course, they are required to design various types