Evolving Product Development Skills Through Group Based Activity Instructions in Engineering Exploration Course

Activity-based teaching-learning describes the range of pedagogical approaches that involve learning by doing hands-on experiments or activities. It encourages students to actively participate in the teaching-learning process through problem-solving or hands-on activities, also the group based activity instructions help students to develop soft skills. The engineering exploration course is an innovative course offered to the first-year curriculum in order to transfer the student’s ideas into real-life products through a number of activities such as problem-solving, engineering design process, multi-disciplinary engineering skills, project planning, communication, teamwork, ethics, and sustainability. The course includes multidisciplinary modules that fulfill the requirement of the product development process and each module is designed to teach through activity-based instructions. The aim of the engineering exploration course implementation is to develop multi-disciplinary product development skills in engineering students in the first year. All the sessions of the course delivery were well planned by considering the need statements of each project group so that students can acquire the necessary skills during activity sessions and apply those during product development. The student groups are formed heterogeneously with a maximum of four students in each group. The activity kit was designed for each session by considering team size so that all team members take active participation during various activities and develop their technical as well as soft skills. The initial result of implementation shows that students have developed excellent multidisciplinary products in the group and acquired technical knowledge as well as soft skills. The responses of the students show that 68% of the students rated this activity 10 out of 10, and also gave some suggestions for improvement as it is implemented first time. The students were very positive about this initiative and involved in each activity during the product development process. From the attainment of the course outcomes, it is observed that all five outcomes were attained more than the targeted value of 75%.