Beyond Outcome-based: Competition-based Learning for Engineering Students

Hands-on practice is an excellent learning medium for students, and we have developed a competition-based module to teach essential hard technical and soft project skills to students in mid-curriculum. Four groups of students were selected to participate in a 150 hour pilot module. The groups were tasked to design and build a wall-climbing robot with hammering ability to identify poorly adhered tiles on vertical walls. Training on the working concepts and the practical aspects of robotic design, electronics, sensor technology and electro-mechanical design was provided. The students integrated these knowledge components to produce a climbing robot as a major embodiment of the learned technique. On completion of the project, students competed for top robot honors by demonstrating their robots’ movements and faulty wall tile identification capability to a panel of judges. In this paper, the different teaching stages in the module; the learning assessment methods and results, as well as the student comments collected throughout the competition-based module are detailed.