Renewable Energy Education for Engineering Freshman Students
Keywords:
Renewable energy, freshman year, graduation projects, career prospectusAbstract
The importance of renewable energy has been increasingly recognized. This paper discusses the significance of offering a renewable energy course in the undergraduate freshman level. It is proposed to adopt the inquiry-based concept in the offered course, where students seek knowledge, rather than been delivered to them. Surveys are provided to three groups of students; one group of graduate students who completed a course on renewable energy and two groups were of undergraduate students, one who have taken a course on renewable energy and the other did not. The objective of the survey is to assess the participants’ opinion on the importance of having a course on renewable energy in the undergraduate engineering curriculum. The different questions in the survey were modeled to challenge the attitude towards renewable energy sources and the knowledge of renewable energy system and sustainable development. This is important to identify and reveal the attitude toward acceptance of renewable energy system. The results of the survey clearly show that most participants believe that renewable energy course and/or related activities should be included. It is also found that most participants thought that solar energy is the most suitable for UAE and will be a major source of income by 2020.
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