2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the past decade, undergraduate enrollment surged in engineering majors across the USA. Unique challenges exist for instructional lab courses with large enrollment, mostly from limited instructional lab support (lab space, equipment & instruments, supporting staff). The limited availability of equipment and physical space usually results in unmanageably large groups and hinders student engagement. It further forces many students to be observers of the experiment, thus forfeiting the opportunity for meaningful hands-on experience and learning. The work presented in this paper is part of a joint effort within the College of Engineering at Purdue University to renovate the instruction of fluid mechanics lab courses in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the School of Mechanical Engineering. To respond to the recent challenges from surging enrollment, we redesigned the course to improve students’ learning experience. Among the many renovations adopted, an open lab concept was developed to implement a challenge-based instruction (CBI) approach in these large undergraduate lab courses. It is expected to create an experiential learning module to support every student’s learning activities in a real-world setting.

The open lab concept was piloted in ME30801, a one-credit course teaching the technical background of experimental techniques used in fluid mechanics and the basics of experiment design by applying fluid mechanics principles. Before the open lab project, the students should have learned from five standard labs the basic skills of lab tests, data analysis, and discovery dissemination. This unique CBI renovation orchestrates a sequence of learning activities in the framework of the Legacy Learning Cycle. The current study examines whether the open lab improves students’ learning of fluid mechanics, with the hypothesis that the newly introduced CBI will have a positive impact on the learning experience of every student in large STEM lab courses. In particular, three (RQs) are examined: RQ1. Do the self-driven open lab projects improve students’ overall learning experience? RQ2. Does the mandatory proposal writing and revision help the students to improve their learning outcomes? RQ3. How do students perceive the challenge-based learning from open lab concepts in large engineering lab courses?

Every student is exposed to this experiential learning experience with two or three teammates working closely to (1) initiate a hypothesis-driven project idea with a real-world challenge, (2) propose a test plan, (3) communicate the project in a written proposal submitted the instructor, (4) revise the test plan by accommodating instructor’s review comments, (5) perform the tests independently, generate the experimental data, and organize the acquired data as evidence related to the hypothesis, (6) communicate the discovery in a written lab report and a recorded presentation video. Exit surveys from six semesters in 2022-2026 received anonymous inputs from 1,800 students, indicating an overwhelmingly positive impact on students’ learning experience.