Towards Achieving Hands-On Project Based Learning beyond Laboratories and into the Dorm Rooms

Abstract

There has been a lot of emphasis placed on providing hands-on project based learning in engineering education A lot of these initiatives have also been successful in creating an environment where the student goes beyond theory and incorporates real-world signals in the experiments. However, there is still a major gap in being able to sustain this kind of excitement being able to provide an immersive hands-on learning experience throughout the tenure of a student's time in engineering. This gap becomes apparent when we consider that a student only spends one-fifths of their time in the lab as compared to a staggering three-fifths of their time doing their homework. However today, apart from some grass root efforts there is not much emphasis to introduce hands-on project based learning as part of a student's homework experience primarily because of the lack of affordable technologies. In this paper, we will explore Project based learning advances in both undergraduate engineering classes like introduction to engineering and senior or capstone design as well as the pipeline that feeds into the university space, the high school programs. We will then make the case for need for project based learning in the dorm room, and what the requirements are to enable educators to make experiments scalable to the dorm room. We will also look at an implementation from Georgia Tech and the lessons learned from their experiment as well as look at some technologies that lend themselves to dorm-room based experiments.