2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Equipping engineering students with the skills and knowledge required to be successful global engineers in the 21st century is one of the primary objectives of undergraduate educators. Enabling students to practice self-directed learning, to find solutions to societal problems that are sustainable, and helping them recognize that they are part of a global community are just of few of our educational goals.
Learning should be a journey through inquiry and discovery. Incorporating project-based education in engineering technology education has been for decades more and more stressed out and the reasons are obvious. Project based teaching fosters student centered learning, allowing to cater to alternative student learning styles and to accommodate heterogeneous student communities. However, less and less of the courses that we offer incorporate a term project as one of the main requirement for assessment and evaluation. Project-based learning and education in engineering technology programs is as much important as laboratory-based education, both being the foremost promoters of teamwork, creative and critical thinking and those that enables students with the hands-on skills they need for a successful career in engineering and technology. Since XX’s ET program is addressed both to young students and seasoned adult learners (transfer students from community colleges), project-led education may be an excellent alternative to traditional education, having the drive to motivate learning and improve problem solving skills to become a more T-shaped engineer and life-long learner.
This investigation aims to evaluate from student learning perspective the benefits of incorporating interdisciplinary entrepreneurially minded and project-based learning into a required Manufacturing Information Management course in XX’s Engineering Technology curricula. The benefits are assessed based on Photovoice reflections as well as written and oral presentations during and at the end of the term and are based on evaluating the level of practical knowledge gained by the students during the development of such projects. Additional benefits will be assessed by having the project with multidisciplinary (EM + STEAM + Bio) character therefore providing real-world experiential learning to better prepare engineering students for entering workforce. Another particularity that will be described in this paper is the approach of involving students in evaluating the outcomes of fellow students’ projects, being required to provide meaningful comments and justification of their suggested solution improvements via tuning protocols during oral presentations. Comparisons will be made between earlier offerings of the course with the combinations of lecture and project approaches.
These approaches have been studied by the author and is being implemented in Manufacturing Information Management course taught by the author in the Fall 2022 quarter. As a general outcome, students became more involved during class time and also, they shown interest in other research areas, being involved in extra course research activities. Several students also wanted to develop their own EM ideas during these projects and undertake projects of a wider scope. Details related to the intervention and lessons learned will be provided so other engineering instructors can easily re-create in the classroom. Overall, many different fields of engineering instructors can benefit from this project-based approach to combine theory and practice to prepare the students to become better problem solvers and obtain practical solutions to real life/simulated problems using a project-based approach.