Abstract:

Projects are an essential part of the engineering curriculum. They figure in different forms with varied scope, ranging from course projects to capstone designs in the curriculum. Ensuring that the projects provide a good learning experience for all students is a challenge. The problem becomes much more difficult, in the case of the first year, because of limited exposure, knowledge and skills. Furthermore, if not addressed in time, these challenges result in incomplete projects and poor performance by the students in PBL courses.

Background: The context of the study was in a three credit first-year engineering Project-Based Learning (PBL) course titled Engineering Exploration. Students enrolled in the course follows engineering design process, work in a team and build a functional prototype.

Therefore, the right strategies are required in successfully managing these projects. The practices of project management methodologies are a better alternative to conventional approaches to manage students' projects. The current paper discusses the challenges faced by first-year engineering students during the implementation of their course projects and describes how agile project management can be brought into engineering students' multidisciplinary projects. The study demonstrates how agile practice helped the authors improve the success rate of first-year engineering student projects. The analysis of five semesters' data reflects that the success rate of the projects is improved with the use of the agile practice. Detailed prototype analysis along with experience of faculty is shared in the full paper.

Keywords:

Agile Methodology, Multidisciplinary, project based learning, project implementation process, scrum methodology.