Engineering Exploration : A Collaborative Experience of Designing and Evolving a Freshman Course

Designing innovative freshman courses has attracted engineering educators world over. "Engineering Exploration" course is the outcome of one such effort and it focuses on engineering problem solving, multi-disciplinary engineering skills, engineering design process, team work and collaboration. Ethics and sustainability are also essential part of this course. The course is characterized by a number of unique features: 1. It promotes students’ learning through exploration and learning by doing. 2. It is codesigned by a team of faculty members from diverse engineering disciplines 3. Learning is facilitated by a group of teachers engaged in team teaching 4. It follows PBL pedagogy with focus on both engineering design process and the product. Over the past three years the course is acting as a test best for a number of experiments in engineering education resulting in several reforms not only in this course but also influencing several other courses in the subsequent years of undergraduate engineering degree programs. The course is today recognized by India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) as a foundation course for its National ESDM skills Training & Research Academy (NETRA). Through this initiative 17 institutions in India have adopted "Engineering Exploration" course in their curriculum. This paper discusses the evolution of the course

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