Hands-On Intro to Engineering Design Rudy Schlaf Dept. of Electrical Engineering University of South Florida Keywords: project based learning, engineering lifestyle, fun- based learning,pride,competition,ownership,practical skills

Why? What problem are you solving? – Only a minority of graduating students ever experienced being in charge of a project and seeing it through to a successful conclusion – Graduating students have only few applied skills – Students are not excited about engineering – Students do not live the ‘engineering lifestyle’ What are your educational objectives? – Make engineering an integral part of their lives – Generate genuine excitement about engineering – Give them practical problem solving skills and the desire to get involved and roll up their sleeves and design/build something.

When? I participated in a startup company in I learned to build professional electronics without any practical prior experience Had a lot of fun and wanted to share this ‘awesome power’ with students Hence I and a ME graduate student, Eric Tridas, developed the Makecourse in Spring 2014 with the goal to involve as many students as possible Ramped the course to ever larger student numbers, now using ‘course alumni’ as peer- TAs. >200 students took the course over 4 semesters

Where? This course is offered at USF However, all course videos and materials are available freely on-line via YouTube and our website at YouTube channel has now almost 3000 subscribers worldwide Concept could easily be scaled to other courses and departments

What? We developed an intriguing concept for teaching that is based on fun, individual creativity, pride and friendly peer-competition. This concept does not need additional resources (no textbook, instead students get a hardware kit; ordinary classrooms can be used. This makes this concept easily scalable in a fiscally tight environment. Use of undergraduate peer-TAs allows large class sizes while providing cost-effective one-on-one instruction in a flipped classroom scenario. Our theory of change is that if every student invents his/her own project and pursues it during the class, ownership, pride and competition is generated that greatly encourages students to self- learn the topic at hand. What has worked well?: Unleashing student creativity creates a fun and diverse classroom environment. Pride, ownership and competition are introduced into the learning environment. This greatly enhances the students’ ability to focus on learning and skill building instead of slacking off to Facebook et al. during traditional lecture approaches.

Prognosis? Documenting impact: Student projects are posted on and speak for themselves. How do you plan to scale-up? We are aiming to ‘inject’ regular courses with the makecourse approach. We hope this will allow implementation of ‘fun based learning’ concepts within the standard teaching framework. Challenges faced: Opposition by some colleagues who deem hands-on as ‘too technician’ and ‘not appropriate for college students’. Glacial university systems that stand in the way of change. Mandatory GenEd requirements that prevents generating an exciting and challenging engineering education environment. Advice from others at FOEE: Many students appear to have difficulties adjusting to the self-learning approach and not getting everything served up pre-chewed. We need to find a way to get them started and get that first exciting experience of plugging something together and seeing it work.

– Involve USF IEEE chapter into the Makecourse concept The USF IEEE student chapter now distributes Makecourse ‘course kits’ and a scaled down version, the Eeawesome Kit, which is used for IEEE workshops and during foundation courses etc…to excite undergrads about electrical engineering. This turned out to be a great recruiting tool for the IEEE. Check out for more details. The IEEE chapter also is responsible for our ‘Awesome Prizes’ that are awarded to the best Makecourse student projects each semester. The prizes are substantial (~$ ) and therefore encourage students to go the additional project mile (visit and click on the prizes link on the front page)