Student Voice in Transformation from Studying Engineering to Doing Engineering

Abstract

In the current trend of engineering education we have suddenly reached a point where it has become a certificatethat veryfew engineerswould recommend you to take. This is more of a case for engineering students from private colleges.To tackle this issue in our college the senior students decided along with the faculty to introduce a few good practices among the freshers. The objective was to give the students an overview of doing engineering practically, that included ways to create active and practical environment to do engineering and how engineering should be learnt best. These ideas were collected from various student groups and implemented in a short 1 day workshop on "Doing Engineering" in two batches. Student role was a major factor in this workshop as they were supposed to voice their opinion, think, create, design, implement and finally build the chair after completion of the workshop.Instructor's major role was to guide the students on the basics of designing a chair and pointing out the realistic side of the real time application of the results. These small tasks were introduced as steps for transformation in the current rat race for getting more than just an engineering certificate by involving students for making projects in the first year itself instead of waiting for 3rd and 4th year. This task had some smaller objectives too that included the following but were not limited to them: project based learning, induce creativity, technical understanding, practical skills, thinking beyond the present what eyes can see and the ability to question established facts and norms.