Use of a Vertically Integrated Project Team to Develop Hands-On Learning Modules

This paper describes a mechanism where engineering students simultaneously earn credit for a multidisciplinary project-based course while they act as partners in education, designing and building educational experimental platforms to be used by their fellow students. The project course is implemented under a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) program. This paper highlights three categories of experiments: ones that can be used in a classroom to explore a basic concept within a lecture-based course, ones that can be used as do-it-yourself projects to teach skills in a campus makerspace environment, and ones that can be used as multi-week experiments in a laboratory course. A sample project is given for each category.