Engaging computer engineering freshmen through a voluntary competitive team project with mentoring

Abstract

Many freshman computer engineering students need hands-on activity in addition to classroom instruction to sustain their interest and motivation in their chosen discipline. Last spring the Department of Computer Engineering at RIT offered freshmen a voluntary zero-credit freshman project, with one scheduled contact hour per week and with no grade, that consisted of incorporating a commercial off-the-shelf radio controlled (RC) car with a provided microcontroller, motor driver circuitry, and line sensors to make it travel a track by following a line in the center to compete for the best time. After three one-hour traditional classroom lectures on the basic functionality of the provided components, freshmen were assigned to teams of five or six based on results of a questionnaire they submitted, and each team worked with an assigned upper-class mentor. Finally, as part of a campus-wide festival, teams competed in an exhibition, which consisted of elimination rounds of round-robin matches of pairs of teams with two symmetric tracks, where each car ran once on each track within a round and where each car ran in two matches. During the quarter, about 70% of students actively and consistently worked in their teams every week. Every team entered a working car in the competition, and students reported that the common experience of taking something familiar and applying newly learned computer engineering skills to produce something tangible that actually "works" made the discipline more relevant to them. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.