This is a Complete Evidence-based Practice paper submission. Creating a team-based design project for a multi-disciplinary first year engineering class means meeting a variety of constraints and goals. At the University of Kentucky, projects are required to include content from a variety of engineering disciplines-such as mechanical, electrical, materials and computer science. Projects must also motivate student curiosity and enable students to meet learning objectives required for success in subsequent discipline specific coursework. These projects are designed to require all student team members to perform mathematical modeling to understand design constraints, computer programming, computer aided design, and prototyping to bring design concepts to reality. Working on the project also allows for professional skills such as practice of team interaction processes, communication skills, and basic project management skills. Another goal in project creation is to give students a design project that addresses aspects of engineering and computer science that: represent recent trends in engineering, are not normally covered in their high school background, are inexpensive to implement, and presents these in a way that is both challenging-yet attainable-to students with a semester or less of MATLAB programming. Machine vision uniquely fit this list of goals. Furthermore, educators may utilize a similar curricular framework to engage students. Future work will investigate the ways in which students later engage with machine vision concepts learned in the first-year program in their major-specific coursework. Additionally, two necessary improvements to the analysis methods are survey specific questions related to the machine vision portion of the projects and the inclusion of data from multiple instructors over multiple academic years, as the conclusions drawn in this study are limited.