Improved student independence through competitive tinkering

Two recent trends in engineering education are gamification and application of makerspace concepts. We have combined these to develop multiple open-ended competitive active learning activities. Assessment data show that relative to a baseline offering, the treatment group developed a marginal improvement in attitude and motivation but a significant improvement in student confidence and self-assessed abilities. Student self-assessed independence rose 9% across the baseline offerings and 16% in the treatment offerings, with at least 18 respondents per group. This manuscript discusses the course structure, the activities, the assessment data, and lessons learned from student focus groups and instructor observation. The focus groups reported that the factors that improved their skills and motivation the most were the competitions, the use of small teams for projects, and the open-ended nature of the projects; whereas the most detrimental factors included not enough live lecture time (a flipped classroom was employed so that contact hours focused on the projects) and not enough example problems were covered for the students to learn the mathematical mechanics. We conclude that a balance must be struck to let students learn sufficient basic skills through more traditional approaches while still providing some open-ended activities to inspire them.