Make to innovate: Blending of project-based learning and flipped classroom pedagogies to provide real-world engineering experiences to engineering students

Abstract

The Make to Innovate program at Iowa State University in the Aerospace Engineering department has been operating for seven years. We implemented this program to give students across multiple disciplines and different levels of experience the ability to learn through experiential learning. The goal of the program is to reinforce students' understanding of engineering fundamentals, engage students with faculty and industry experts, and to augment the students' skills to include professional development skills such as teamwork, leadership, and communications. The program uses a Project Based Learning (PBL) framework to give students a hands-on approach to solving engineering problems. Students work on their own in their team environments to solve the problems needed to complete the project. In this paper, we outline details on how we have implemented this program. We include discussion on the pedagogy used in creating and implementing of the program. We also discuss the assessment we use for measuring both the students' progress and success in the program. This includes discussion on the homework and other assignments that we assign to the students. We will show how we incorporate our industry partners by requiring students to meet with them and how they serve as technical advisors for the project. Finally, as this program has been operating for seven years, we will discuss the lessons that we have learned in implementing this program, the changes we have made over the years and some of the results we have gathered.