Engineering Exploration -

Engineering Exploration

About Center for Engineering Exploration

The Center for Engineering Exploration was established under guidance of Netra Accelerator Foundation, Bangalore. The activities of center are supported by India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, Electronics Skill Sector Council of India.

The center offers a multidisciplinary, design thinking driven course to first year students. The course follows Project Based Learning pedagogy.

The key drivers for project-based approach over the last few years have been: pressure from industry, accreditation bodies worldwide, and society in general that engineering graduates must demonstrate, at the end of the program, not just memorize technical knowledge, but higher competencies. They are not necessarily only engineering knowledge-based competencies, but they are also related to the professional practice.

About the Engineering Exploration course

Engineering Exploration course is being implemented by MIT Group of Institutes to encourage students to connect to societal problems and offer innovative solutions by building products.

The course offers students opportunity to experience entrepreneurial approach at first year level. By the time they complete under graduate program students will have opportunity to convert these prototype products into commercial products and become successful entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial approach thus embedded in students personality will also help them in their professional job career. Student groups work on identified needs and develop solutions using engineering design process. The course utilizes a mixed mode of delivery, where discussion with instructors and hands on activities are combined to provide better understanding of concepts.

Activities happening in Engineering Explorations

The central horizontal path from need statement to project statement is the main flow of the course. The modules such as introduction to engineering , engineering design, project management, mechanism offer the students necessary information to achieve the objective of the course.
To begin with students are introduced to the role of an engineer as a problem solver.
To experience this they carry out hands on activity such as making a sphere with a paper and clips, or a structure with given resources.
To explain the concept of need statements and to be able to differentiate between need and problem statement, students first build a catapult with limited resources.
Now, they are ready to discuss the concept of need, the constraints, objectives etc.
At this juncture the engineering design course is introduced.
It covers engineering Design Process, Multidisciplinary facet of design, Pair wise comparison chart, Introduction to mechatronics system, generation of multiple solution, Pugh Chart.
At this level students select a need statement for their final project.
With role play as designer and customer they identify objectives of dummy project. Now, they can create a problem statement.
They are introduced with the Concept of mechanisms that cover
Basic Components of a Mechanism,
Degrees of Freedom or Mobility of a Mechanism,
4 Bar Chain,
Crank Rocker Mechanism,
Slider Crank Mechanism.
Project Management is also covered to give importance of teamwork in project management, Plan project using relevant project management tools like checklist, timeline and Gantt chart, apply documentation skills to prepare, store and share project report.

The course has feature of continuous in semester evaluation. At the end of each module and activity students are evaluated and assigned grades. As per university, the course is for 1 credit. We have categorically included Ethics and Sustainability part along with engineering modules to inculcate professional ethics and know responsibility towards environment.