Exploring the factors influencing students’ experience with challenge-based learning: a case study

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an active-learning pedagogy increasingly used in Engineering Education to prepare students for their future careers by emphasizing knowledge acquisition and application and developing disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills. The purpose of this study is to describe the implementation of a CBL course, guided by the spiderweb curriculum framework, for first-year engineering students from different disciplines and explore students’ perceptions of factors that facilitated or inhibited their learning. We analyzed the results of the formal course evaluation consisting of a survey and two open-ended questions. In addition, we conducted 16 individual interviews after the end of the course. Results indicated that students appreciated the real-life aspect of the challenge, and a client’s involvement enhanced their engagement to the challenge and made their learning relevant. On the other hand, students seemed to find the course structure quite complicated, with many meetings during the week, several communication platforms, and the distribution of individual and group work for the final assignment. Lessons learned and future directions for practice and research are discussed.