Imparting System-Development Skills and Project Based Learning to First-Year Engineering Students

With the aim of making the Indian education system more holistic, inclusive and flexible, the National Education Policy (NEP) has recommended the integration of vocational and technology-enabled learning, and promotion of multidisciplinary higher education. In this paper, we describe an interdisciplinary lab which we have implemented in our institution as a mandatory two-credit course which is common to about 2000 freshmen from all engineering disciplines. This course has been running successfully for 4 years. Teams of students from different engineering branches such as Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering work on creating a practical and useful system using electronic sensors, actuators, and processor boards. Instead of a fixed set of experiments, we encourage students to explore domain-specific applications and develop practical solutions. We have observed that early exposure to design not only enhances their technical competence and intellectual curiosity but also fosters innovation, teamwork, and experiential learning skills. We present both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the impact of the lab on student performance. Our lab is based on low-cost boards and we believe that other institutions can implement a similar lab without large investment in infrastructure.