Links among student club projects, senior design projects, and international competition projects, a case study

Links among student club projects, senior design projects, and international competition projects, a case study Abstract: xxxx University is a teaching orientated university without Engineering Ph.D. programs. How to engage undergraduate students in research projects, especially extra-curriculum research projects is challenging from multiple aspects, including financial support, faculty advising support, students' motivation, and resources. This paper presents our successful experience so far with a series of student projects from different entities in three years period from 2018 to 2021, such as IEEE student club and regional competition projects, senior design projects solving local community and industrial problems, and international intelligent ground vehicle competition projects, etc. These projects originated from different opportunities and evolved in variable ways. Yet they link among each other in terms of scope, content, and engineering knowledge. They all bare the commonly important threads of Engineering education, namely student engagement, hands-on experience, real world design and application, as well as teamwork, time management skills, and project management skills. Detailed information of each sample project, the evolution from one project to another, the common thread linking all projects together, factors that contribute to the progress of the projects and students experience, involvement of community and industry, internal and external grant, as well as the relationship to engineering curricula will be presented. This paper will also discuss lessons learned for duplicating the experience, on-going projects, a new technical elective course "intelligent vehicle essentials", and our roadmap for the next few years to sustain two parallel platforms for education and research.