A starter activity design process to deepen student's understanding of outcome-related project learning objectives

Engineering educational programs increasingly rely on project-based learning. Within, it is crucial to early present to students intended learning outcomes from the outset of large projects. However, even if well formulated, many outcome-related project learning objectives are not properly understood by students out of experiences. Thus, some students struggled to identify objectives throughout activities and tended to distance themselves from acquisitions. Short concrete activities could advantageously help student self-recognize learning objectives. For such, we propose a systematic insertion of authentic starter activities in the front-end of large projects, so as to give students a better insight and deeper understanding of the knowledge, skills, and abilities they are expected to acquire. Properly designed starter activities promote enthusiasm, motivation, and increase project involvement. For program developments, this paper proposes a three-phase process, from design to improvement, for integrating starter activities and to favor a coherent treatment throughout a curriculum. This process is based on our six years of experiences with large semester projects.