Tinkering and Making to Inspire Engagement in First-Year Mechanical Engineering Students

This is innovative practice paper describes a tinkering- and maker-based approach to engaging first-year students. Engineering students should get right into building and making. Much of what they will learn across the undergraduate engineering curriculum is about building (learning CAD tools, manufacturing processes) as well as analyzing built things or the characteristics/behaviors of physical phenomena (many of their engineering sciences courses). In teaching an introductory engineering course to first-year students, there is both the need to address the array of (broad) topics across engineering and get students excited about their major. By introducing a collaborative making project very early in the course, the hope is to get students excited, introduce them to working collaboratively and creatively to solve problems, and make some implicit link making connections and spurring curiosity. The general approach to using tinkering and making as pedagogy is to 1) introduce a topic with a simple hands-on activity that can be done in the classroom in 30 minutes, 2) send the remainder of the class period discussing and debriefing, 3) follow up with specific technical content related to activity, 4) bridge to a more in-depth design challenge. This is also to encourage tinkering and making/thinking through materials with a number of considerations: what is success in this challenge, how to work through a creative design process, and how to balance a number of systems considerations (materials, time, role/jobs of people during the short demonstration window). With a making- and design-based approach the ambition is to make it more fun and worthwhile for students as well as help the instructor enjoy teaching the course/coach students through the design process, making skills, and applying those learning to solve problems that they care about. By tinkering, it is meant to start by showing students the basics (of some area of engineering fundamentals, of making) and expect them to then take that knowledge and skills further through exploration by imagining and building a physical solution, in an interactive and reflective way. Project based and design challenges are pedagogical approaches that can really engage and excite students. For a 1st year introduction to engineering course, we aim to bring making through hands-on design projects/challenges throughout the semester in small chunks chunks (2–3 weeks).