GIFTS: A “School Store” to Promote Sustainability and Product Iteration in a First-Year Engineering Design Course

The hands-on project for our first-year engineering design course involves working in a team to build an autonomous vehicle from scratch, and we have about 120 teams building a vehicle each semester. While the project meets our educational objectives, we want to reduce the financial cost and physical waste involved in the teams needing to buy new parts for their project, especially since most parts do not get reused after the course. To make the project more sustainable, we created a "School Store" where teams can "buy" recycled parts to use on their vehicles. Parts include a wide variety of items useful for building autonomous vehicles, and we originally stocked the store with parts purchased for the course and parts donated by teams who took the course in past semesters. Teams are each given an allowance to purchase items from the School Store. We developed a web-based platform to track the purchases and remaining allowances of each team. All functional items are expected to be returned at the end of the semester, and teams are encouraged to donate any externally sourced parts as well. The introduction of the School Store has led to a number of positive outcomes. Teams purchase fewer items out-of-pocket, reducing the cost for students. Teams can get parts immediately, encouraging teams to start physically building sooner and reducing delays when replacing malfunctioning components. Additionally, the store allows teams to try different parts and configurations on their vehicle without financial risk, since parts can be returned to the store if the team determines they do not work for their vehicle. While each team can currently buy only a portion of their parts from the School Store due to a limited number of parts, we will use donations to continue to build the store's inventory to further reduce the environmental impact of the project and the cost to students.