Creating meaningful experiences through extracurricular project-based experiential learning

Abstract

Educators, employers, and students all understand the value of both taking part in extracurricular activities and the importance of integrating experiential learning into the engineering curriculum. Unfortunately, we know quite little about the impact that such extracurricular project-based experiential learning has on educating undergraduate students studying engineering. Informed by the literature in the fields of student engagement and experiential learning, this paper examines perceptions and experiences of nascent engineers to understand how these specific extracurricular activities contribute to their collegiate experience. Students who were taking part in extracurricular engineering projects while completing their four-year engineering degree at the University of Minnesota were included in this qualitative case study. Ten semi-structured hour long interviews (six males and four females) were conducted to collect the bulk of the data for the qualitative analysis. This data was supplemented with three observations and the collection and inspection of artifacts. Key findings include evidence that extracurricular projects serve as an especially impactful engagement activity for engineering students. Such projects also are effective tools for increasing self-efficacy and motivation, especially among women, and serve as a particularly valuable career preparation experience. Additionally, the organic design-build process students engage in outside the structure of a classroom parallels with Kolb's model of experiential learning, suggesting a particularly suitable method for educating engineers in the design process. Going forward, engineering colleges and universities have multiple opportunities to enhance the participation rate and quality of their students' access to extracurricular projects. This paper discusses these opportunities along with various challenges, while acknowledging that there is much unknown about the educational value of extracurricular project-based experiential learning. The work here hopes to help fill that gap in what may be a fast growing facet of an engineering student's college experience. This paper is a condensed version of a completed dissertation for a 2016 Ed.D. Degree by the author.