Teaching them how to fish: Industry-focused student projects in systems engineering

This paper provides an overview of industry-focused systems engineering team projects for university students. The projects described are from two universities: the University of Arizona (U.S.A.) and Technion (Israel). The role of such projects in teaching and learning of systems engineering is explored, specifically in the context of constructivist learning theory. Characteristics of successful student projects are discussed together with examples of such projects and their resulting artifacts. We conclude by proposing measures of success of such projects.