Assessment Of Hands On Introductions To Industrial Engineering

This paper focuses on two Introduction to Industrial Engineering courses offered at different institutions. The instructors of these courses have independently developed and incorporated numerous hands-on and experiential learning exercises to convey core topics in the field of Industrial Engineering. While it is evident that the courses are more entertaining with these exercises, it is less clear that they affect student learning in positive ways. Thus, this paper describes similarities and differences between the approaches used to address the common topics covered in the two courses. We then present data from student surveys on what they perceive they have learned about major topics covered in the course, and their engagement level with the instruction used for the various topics. This assessment enables us to evaluate the efficacy of the hands-on, active learning approaches versus more traditional approaches.