Abstract:

Traditional instruction in undergraduate biochemical engineering laboratory courses has been strained by COVID-19 pandemic safety policies concerning physical distancing and laboratory access restriction. Key skills and concepts, like sterile bioreactor sampling or cell growth kinetics, formerly taught through hands-on and close-contact instructor-student or student-student interactions in the laboratory must be communicated at a distance or entirely through virtual and online methods. Transitioning to these unconventional teaching formats presents new challenges for instructors and students adapting to evolving pandemic conditions and governmental guidelines. These challenges require instructional materials to be specifically developed for a hybrid or completely online learning environment to facilitate meaningful engagement of students in biochemical engineering techniques and knowledge. In this work, we demonstrate an approach to teach undergraduate chemical engineering students the principles of microbial fermentation through a multi-phase video series in tandem with computational simulation software for yeast fermentation. The video series is split into four phases, beginning with an introduction to the fundamentals of fermentation, following with the clarification of mathematical concepts and equations, then guiding students in using the simulation software through screen-sharing walkthrough, and finally providing case studies from the scientific literature. Our video approach to instruction allows students to engage with the course material completely virtually and asynchronously, accommodating for various time-zones and personal circumstances. Furthermore, the integration of simulation software provides students the opportunity to understand growth models and kinetics, test hypotheses, and predict the effect of changing experimental conditions based on previous experiments or case studies without access to the laboratory in person. Simulation tools also enable researchers and students in traditional or hybrid learning environments to perform computationally informed design of experiments for the physical lab, an effort that will be investigated further moving forward in the project. The results from this work indicate student understanding of the biochemical principles of fermentation, increased comprehension of the mathematical models used to reproduce experimental data, and greater awareness of the value of simulation and computational tools in biochemical processing.

Keywords:

Remote, hybrid, learning, simulation, fermentation.