Assessment of hands-on activities to enhance students’ learning in the first year engineering skills course

The engineering skills course at the CQUniversity has very comprehensivecurriculum for the first year undergraduate engineering program to meet the pedagogicalneeds in accordance with both university’s and Engineers Australia’s objectives. Theproblem-based educational approach taken has recently incorporated a set of hands-onlearning activities to help achieve students’ learning goals. An anonymous survey wasconducted after the first term in order to evaluate the effectiveness of these hands-onactivities and to obtain students’ feedback. This paper presents the findings and bothquantitative as well as qualitative analysis of these results. The findings of the survey arevery encouraging, and provide evidence of effectiveness of these hands-on activities onstudents’ learning. Furthermore, the suggestions received through quantitative andqualitative feedback of this survey will be used for the course improvement in the future.