Work in progress: Starter-project for first semester students to survey their engineering studies

To give students studying Electrical or Mechanical Engineering at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences a smoother beginning, three weeks in the first semester are used for project-based learning and self-learning exercises. The project-based learning part is used to do short-term projects (1 to 3 days) to motivate all the different subjects (mathematics, computer sciences, microcontrollers, principles of electrical engineering, measurement engineering and others) engineering students have to study during their time at the university and show the connection between these subjects. Short-term projects allow an insight into the real world of engineering, improve the student motivation, and enable students to develop soft skills. If projects like this are done in the beginning of the study it also helps them tremendously to connect to their fellow students. Further, there is the intention to prepare a situation where students “feel like engineers”. This paper presents a three full-day (organised on three days with four weeks gaps in between) course in the winter term 2014 using LEGO Mindstorm robot kits to give students an easy access to programming, algorithms, sensor technology, robotics and much more.