Huihui Qi, PH.D.
Engineering Pedagogy and Design Lab
News
June 2025- Professor Qi Received ASEE Mechanics Division Archie Higdon Distinguished Educator Award
Huihui received the 2024 -2025 ASEE Mechanics Division Archie Higdon Distinguished Educator Award. This award, originally the Distinguished Educator Award, was renamed in 1992 in honor of the first recipient. It is given annually for distinguished and outstanding contribution to Engineering Mechanics Education.
May 2025 - Professor Qi Received UC San Diego Senate Distinguished Teaching Award
Huihui (left in the picture) received UC San Diego Distinguished Teaching Award in May 2025 in recognition her outstanding teaching and educational leadership at MAE and UC San Diego. MAE Department Chair Dr. Stefan Smith (right in the picture) and several other faculty from MAE, ECE, Nano engineering, T+LC attend the award ceremony to celebrate this milestone.
June 2024 - Professor Qi and Collaborators Presented Multiple Paper at 2024 ASEE Conference and Featured in JSOE News
Huihui and her collaborators attended the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference in June. They had the opportunity to present their research on the use of oral exams in engineering courses to the largest gathering of engineering educators in the country. UCSD JSOE News highlighted the papers presented by Huihui's team and other JSOE researchers in this article.
October 2023-Professor Qi's Education Innovation Featured on Edsurge
Huihui is interviewed about her research by EdSurge journalist Jeffrey R. Young. The article "As AI Chatbots Rise, More Educators Look to Oral Exams — With High-Tech Twist" highlights how Huihui's implementation of oral exams not only maintains academic integrity, but also prevent cheating through AI chatbots. This approach also eliminates the logistical challenges of in-person exams, such as scheduling and long waits. Oral exams teach students to think critically and learn to solve engineering problems through dialogue.
June 2023 - Lab Received Best Paper Award at 2023 ASEE Conference
Huihui, Kibo, Richard, Trevor, Edward and Isabella's paper titled " Improving Students’ Learning through Inquiry-Based Learning Activities as Pre-training for Mechanics of Materials Classes" received Mechanics Divison Best Paper Award at 2023 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in Batimore!
Huihui presented the paper and received the award on behalf of the team.
June 2023 -Professor Qi's Research and Educational Innovation and Isabella Featured on Wall Street Journal
Huihui and Isabella was interviewed by Wall Street Journal Journalist Douglass Belkin. In the article published on June 1, titled " As AI-Enabled Cheating Roils Colleges, Professors Turn to an Ancient Testing Method", Huihui's work (funded by NSF) to introduce oral exams when all university classes moved to remote learning in March 2020. Huihui launched oral exams to improve learning outcomes by moving past rote memorization and asking students to think on their feet. Students provide a conceptual understanding of the subject matter and retain learning. The oral exams also reduce the ability to cheat.
UCSD JSOE News also highlighted this article.
February 2023 - Professor Qi's Oral Exam Project Featured on UC San Diego Today
The article "Oral Exams Improve Engineering Student Performance, Motivation" discusses the preliminary results of using oral exams from Huihui's study (funded by the NSF). The results show that oral exams, conducted alongside traditional written exams, improved students' understanding and boosted their motivation to learn. This was especially true for first-generation college students. Researchers are now working on scaling the oral exam model for large classes and improving its implementation, including training teaching assistants and refining assessment methods.
December 2022 - Professor Qi's Sustainable Design Class Featured on UC San Diego Today
The MAE department had debuted its first sustainable engineering design course, developed and taught by Huihui. The course encourages engineers to consider environmental impact early in the design process, as opposed to reacting to environmental challenges later. Students worked on hands-on projects like creating sustainable products or improving existing ones, including a "Sink Monkey" device to reduce water usage. The article "New course expands sustainable practices to all engineering disciplines" mentions how the course will be offered in future quarters to inspire engineers to proactively integrate sustainability into their designs.
