Introductory Project-Based Design Course to Meet Socioeconomic Challenges

An active/cooperative, introductory engineering design course is planned, implemented, assessed, and evaluated using the project based learning approach to allow freshman level students to gain professional hands-on engineering design experience. The course project exposes the students to important contemporary issues, and excites their interest to address them in a creative way. The students are guided to discover by themselves how and why engineering approaches work, rather than simply providing a recipe for a solution. The open-ended design process allows the students to discover underlying complex engineering and scientific principles, and provide motivation for further study and engagement. The course was implemented for the first time in fall 2009. The students were asked to design a small wind turbine suitable for home use for energy saving purposes. Direct and indirect assessment tools indicated high level of achievement of course learning outcomes together with a high level of student satisfaction.

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