2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Competing on an extracurricular engineering competition team like Baja or Formula can add to the range of experiences and skills already gained in the classroom, or provide learning opportunities not as possible in a classroom setting. Freedom to experiment with designs and fail are just a few mindsets less possible in the formal curriculum due to how much needs to be taught and what is being taught. This research project aims to illustrate this transfer and knowledge brokering between formal and informal learning environments and how we might benefit both in-class and out-of-class learning.
To focus what experiences and benefits really make these types of teams special interviews with a variety of undergrade engineering students on these teams are conducted. Along with those interviews there will be interviews with recent alumni. These interviews will try to find the common experiences and benefits they have gained or have had that has helped them both on their team and the relationships between these teams and other competition teams they communicated and worked with. We hope that illustrating effective practices in the classroom and in the engineering competition team experience can inform for better learning and student engagement within and across learning environments as well as it can make for better future engineers.