Space Maker: A Place Where Creativity, Innovation and Hands-on Learning Join to Improve Engineering Education

Abstract

Traditional engineering education has been successful until the end of the 20th century. However, the fundamental technological changes of the past decade pose us the question whether this traditional education approach meets the needs of the 21st. century. It is very likely that our future engineers will have to face multidisciplinary problems, and that they will need a systemic approach to solve them. To meet these challenges it is necessary to revise the existing engineering curricula, incorporating facilities where students can design and implement projects early in the curriculum and integrated throughout, experiencing first hand how theory, computer simulation and experiments are used to develop solutions to engineering problems. This corresponds to the well known paradigm of hands-on learning. With these goals, Space Maker was created. It is a facility where students can develop their own projects, or projects proposed by faculty members as part of the courses they teach, allowing them to develop STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills, as well as the capabilities for team work and to communicate ideas. In this paper, several projects being carried out at Space Maker by Electronic Engineering students, are described. The projects are in the areas of mobile robots and signal processing.