Sustainable Change in a First-Year Engineering Program

This Work in Progress, Research-to-Practice report focuses on an overview of an extensive project to update the First-Year Engineering Program, Michigan Technological University. After three planning years, and multiple pilot course offerings, we rolled out at scale in Fall, 2017. Our core student outcome goals in the revamped first-year program include strengthening the ability for open-ended problem solving, enhanced facility with computational problem solving applied to engineering problems, and increased student growth in traits of self-starting learning and positive attitudes for life-long learning. In this report, we describe both the core components of our revised program and the process we have followed to gain support for our revised first-year program, thus promoting program sustainability. We conclude with a core list of research questions we will pursue beginning in AY 2018-2019.