Leveraging the final project to improve student motivation in introductory digital design courses

Student retention rates in engineering, especially among traditionally underrepresented groups, remain an obstacle to training a large, diverse engineering workforce. The NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 indicate that of students entering college with an intent to major in engineering, only 63% graduate with an engineering degree [1]. With research suggesting that misperceptions or a lack of knowledge about what work in a certain field is like can deter students from studying that discipline [2], [3], it is possible that providing a meaningful project experience at the introductory level could provide a strong positive impact on retention rates. This could be especially true for disciplines like Digital Design, where students of have little to no exposure to the discipline before starting college. This paper discusses my work to develop a representative design project for introductory digital design students with the goal of increasing retention.