by Karl Vogel | Engineering
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Kiewit Hall is redefining how traditional academic spaces help prepare students for career success.
Opening for the spring semester Jan. 22, the six-story, privately funded, $115 million building is the university’s academic hub for engineering education. It connects five engineering facilities and is home to the construction management program. It offers a mix of multi-purpose classrooms, instructional labs, engineering student services, maker spaces for student organizations and a large outdoor plaza.
Lance C. Pérez, dean of engineering, said everything about the design of the 182,000-square-foot building has been purposeful.
“Make no mistake, Kiewit Hall is very much an academic building — but some of the design elements reflect the fact that engineering is a professional career,” Pérez said. “We wanted it to reflect what our students will experience when they graduate, and what corporations and engineering firms are expecting of their employees.”
Featuring state-of-the-art technologies, classroom spaces in Kiewit Hall are specially designed for the unique demands of engineering instruction.
“It is well known that the traditional lecture style of teaching is not effective for most engineering courses,” Pérez said. “We wanted to design classrooms that supported evidence- based pedagogies that over the past 20 years have been shown to increase student learning outcomes in engineering classes. That was a very deliberate decision.”
More than 15 classrooms are designed with flexibility in mind. The furniture, including the teacher’s location, can be arranged for custom learning environments and to better facilitate group work and collaboration.
Read more:
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/kiewit-hall-opens-optimized-to-prepare-generations-of-engineers/