2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Retention of students within Mechanical Engineering, particularly first-generation students, is a challenge for many Mechanical Engineering programs. Collaborative, project-based learning has been shown to improve retention in first year students. Microcontrollers offer an increasingly easy to use and affordable platform for engaging project-based learning at all levels of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum. In this paper, the use of microcontrollers for collaborative, project-based research projects in a first-year programming course will be examined. In this course, a scaffolded set of three projects took the students from an initial sound and light display project to a full, mechatronics-based, research project. In this final project, teams of students learned about research, developed a hypothesis, designed a microcontroller-based experimental design, analyzed data using Matlab, and presented the results publicly to the university community. Surveys of students participating in the course assessed what factors in the course most supported their learning. Students responded that project team members formed an important support to their learning outside the classroom along with office hours. This survey demonstrated the importance of developing community with such project-based learning. Additionally, survey results demonstrated that first-generation students may have additional obstacles to their learning outside the classroom including family and work responsibilities. Finally, the survey results indicated that including a project focused on engineering research increased students’ knowledge of and interest in the research enterprise of the university.