WIP: From Passive to Passionate: Using Genuine Projects to Motivate Students

This innovative practice WIP paper presents our work to increase student motivation and engagement using real-world projects. Specifically, we assigned final projects to students that came from a genuine need from our research program on campus. The team projects were assigned in a networking course offered to undergraduate and graduate students. Anecdotally, the students seemed more motivated to complete the projects because they knew the requested designs were novel and provided local utility. Student performance toward project completion was, anecdotally, exceptional compared to traditional projects. We surveyed students to assess their perceptions of their mo-tivation and subsequent engagement. The survey results suggest that the students perceived what we also perceived: students had more motivation from these types of projects than the typical contrived recycled projects typically assigned. In this paper, we provide the details behind these projects, how we managed the students to complete them, how we attempted to make the process mirror a commercial environment, and analyze the results of the student survey data. We also outline our experimental design to be executed in future course offerings to better understand how student motivation and engagement is affected by these types of projects in comparison with typical contrived recycled projects. Lastly, we outline how we intend to scale up across campuses and to create an experiential learning environment outside of formal course work.

I. Introduction

To gain some insight into effective teaching practices we can look at the more than 2000-year-old quote from Confucious: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”. Many faculty still use lecture style teaching to engage students, this style has limited success because we are merely broadcasting concepts to students: I hear and I forget. In some instances, faculty create active classrooms employing in-class demonstrations and in-class discussions, these strategies have limited impact: I see and I remember. Additionally, faculty will flip classrooms and spend a significant amount of time solving problems in-class, these strategies are indeed quite effective: I do and I understand. Various out of class activities (e.g., homework assignments, projects) are also used to follow the I do and I understand approach.