Blending Entrepreneurial Education in Senior and Graduate-level Electrical Engineering Courses

This work reports an innovative product-based pedagogy that was developed by incorporating entrepreneurial education into the upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of Texas (UT) at Tyler. Several aspects make this work different from existing research. We adopted an iterative challenge-based STAR cycle and investigated the effectiveness of computational thinking in our course projects. In addition, entrepreneurial components were incorporated into a series of senior and graduate-level courses with the goal of creating student entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship-focused curriculum encouraged students to participate in regional pitch competitions and conference presentations. The findings from this work suggest a positive impact of entrepreneurial learning on student learning outcomes.