Abstract

Recently, there has been an explosion in incorporating (typically, group-level) projects as an important component of individual course-level curricula in many engineering departments. A motivation that is often cited for using projects to evaluate students in groups is ensuring that students are well equipped to collaborate on, and negotiate, real-world projects. Unfortunately, it is not always evident that the actual design and evaluation of such projects by instructors is guided by real-world concerns. We suspect this may be due to a lack of agreement on best practices, or due to misalignment between university curricula and actual (ie, in practice) job requirements. This work-in-progress paper briefly contextualizes the alignment problem, and argues for a framework that treats the project components of courses as first-class citizens. We present five example categories, with three item-prompts each, from the framework, which could potentially be instantiated for independent project-based engineering courses. We also present the outlines of an experimental plan for evaluating the framework.

Date

August 23, 2022

Authors

Mayank Kejriwal

Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition