#BigBeacon Twitter Chat – Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education – February 18

#BigBeacon Twitter chat on Wednesday, February 18, 8pm ET: Join twitter chat (Hashtag: #BigBeacon) regulars as they join CUBE Consulting’s Morgan Bakies (@mmbakies) and Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc) for a twitter discussion of Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education regarding experiential learning. The usual Socratic questions will be posed and all twitter chat participants will be encouraged to engage in a lively chat on this impactful topic.

CUBE Consulting is a student-led consulting organization at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. CUBE Consulting strives to provide engineering and business students with the opportunity to apply classroom theory to real-world consulting projects with local businesses. As the first Junior Enterprise in the United States, CUBE Consulting provides students with international networking and organizational benchmarking.

CUBE Consulting believes in project-based learning. This experiential education helps students find jobs and internships, but more importantly, it helps students find joy in engineering (even in the face of the math and science death march). As a Junior Enterprise, CUBE Consulting want to promote learning through undergraduate organizations which provide life lessons such as teamwork, project management, and prioritization outside of the classroom.

CUBE Consulting’s Director, Morgan Bakies (@mmbakies), and Webmaster, Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc), will be leading the conversation using the #BigBeacon handle. We hope that you will join us for our twitter chat as CUBE Consulting asks:

What are the benefits of experiential education?

CUBE Consulting wants to address the lack of practical experience within engineering classes. It hopes to spark a conversation about best practices in experiential learning and how to make it truly beneficial.

As you wait for February 18 at 8 pm EST for our Twitter chat, we hope you’ll consider the following questions:

• What was your first experience in which you realized what engineers in your major did every day in the workplace?
• How did this experience affect your perspective on engineering? Was it positive or negative?
• What college classes were most relevant to your future or current career? Were they more theoretical or practical?
• Looking back, what college experiences do you wish had been available to prepare you for your career?
•  Do projects teach students better than traditional classes? Why or why not?
• Beyond classroom learning, what are the advantages or disadvantages of experiential learning?
• How can experiential learning be incorporated into classes more? Should it be incorporated more?

For more information on CUBE Consulting’s effort in experiential education, please check out the paper published by ASEE this past June here.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy! First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.

Thank you and CUBE Consulting looks forward to seeing you on Wednesday!