Student Perceptions of a Theme-Based Introduction to Engineering Course

Recently, the curriculum in our Introduction to Engineering course was redesigned to include hands-on, theme-based projects with the hopes of increasing attendance and engagement of our first-year engineering students.Students were presented with four theme descriptions and asked to choose a theme for investigation during the Fall semester.In the Spring, students were asked to select a different theme for investigation.Each theme was comprised of two hands-on, teambased projects.In this paper, we present the eight projects developed for the course along with an assessment of students' perceptions associated with the theme-based projects.