Learning Outcomes of a National Level Project Contest

Abstract

Today, industry needs highly skilled engineering graduates to combat real world challenges in an efficient manner. The mere knowledge of theoretical concepts would not help the students to solve the global challenges. As such, nurturing young minds to appreciate complex problems and to think of innovative solutions either to alleviate prevalent problems or to improve the quality of life become the responsibility of technical institutions. The project contests to showcase the talents would help the students to exhibit their skills and project their ideas with peers and also with the industry experts. In this paper, the learning outcomes of one such national level project contest �TELECOMBAT�, held at the Department of Telecommunication Engineering, BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore has been presented. The contest aimed to bring together industry and academia experts to strengthen the industry-institution interaction and also to get the students' projects evaluated by the industry experts which would help the students to understand the need for implementing quality projects to excel in their professional career. The suggestions given by the experts have been incorporated for evaluating student's projects for the successive years. The rigorous evaluation of the projects involved three rounds with different rubrics for each round. This event provided a platform for institute and industry iteration and also helped students to get first hand feedback from experts and researchers.

Learning Enhancement of Control Engineering: A Competition-Based Case

“…These are contests [23]- [25] in which several teams of students participate to solve a problem or present a project with characteristics like what can be found in real life [26], [27]. The big difference with professional life is that the work done is compared with the rest of the teams [28]. This is intended to motivate students to get the best marks, leaving in the background the conformism of working "the minimum to pass", a common situation in university courses.…”