Engaging Students in an Educational Escape Box Design Project

This innovative practice full paper describes a student project that occurred during the 2023–24 academic year at Michigan Technological University. Students in the second semester engineering class developed an educational escape box as part of a semester-long design experience. Students began by selecting a target audience for the escape box (middle, high school, or college students), identified the topic or skills they wished to highlight, and researched educational strategies to facilitate effective learning. The escape box projects were used to reinforce the common content of the course (spatial visualization, 3D modeling, programming, and design) and the incorporation of an Arduino Uno to collect data from the environment (e.g., sensors) or students (e.g, buttons) and provide information back to the user (e.g., on/off lighting, visual display, program output) to indicate they have/have not successfully completed the challenge. This paper will focus on the development of this unique design project for first-year engineering students and lessons learned throughout the first two iterations of this in the classroom.