Student Engagement and Course Motivation through Experiential Learning Pedagogy

The first-year engineering courses are, in general, challenging for both students and faculties. There have been several studies and surveys conducted to find pedagogical solutions to address the challenges with first year courses. BML Munjal University from India has introduced 'Joy of Engineering' course for first year engineering students so that the students' transition from senior secondary school to engineering becomes seamless, and students get motivated to start enjoying the professional engineering course. The course aims at introducing the very notion of 'engineering' principles to the students. We conducted a study for this course to understand students' engagement and motivation while they were doing this course. In this paper, we present our study on feedback of this course conducted across two years. We have used statistical analysis and machine learning algorithms for comprehending the students' feedback. Our study reveals while the course is appreciated by the students, there are challenges in the implementation of this course.