Integrating Interdisciplinary Project-Based Design Streams into Upper-Level Electrical Engineering Courses: A Methodology Toward Implementing Applications-Oriented, Associative Project Streams into Electrical Engineering Courses

Semester-long design projects associated with capstone Senior Design courses are nothing new to engineering education. 1 And, occasionally, incorporating those semester-long design projects into specific, design-based courses has also been well-documented. 2 But, integrating semesterlong design projects into all of the students' "design-based" and "non-design-based" engineering courses throughout their entire engineering curriculum represents a new "authentic-learning" approach toward teaching engineering to students. Medical Schools and Law Schools predominantly use authentic learning, or experiential learning, techniques to teach our future doctors and lawyers. 3 Engineering education has been slow to follow their lead in this regard, basing almost all instruction on lecture-based and laboratory-based teaching methodologies, rather than authentic learning methodologies. However, in the Spring semester of 2010, an educational initiative was begun to determine the value of integrating semester-long, Project-Based Design Streams (PBDSs) into the entire electrical engineering curriculum. Due to the exceptional response by the students 4, not two years later, there were seven engineering courses that had incorporated semester-long project design streams into their curricula. This paper examines the primary initiative for the inclusion of semester-long design projects into a majority of electrical engineering courses. The paper also examines the manner in which those semesterlong design projects were incorporated into the various students' "design-based" and "non-design-based" engineering courses distributed throughout the various degree programs offered within the department.