Matthew I. Campbell
Assistant Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
mc1@mail.utexas.edu
Christene Moore
Lecturer, Engineering Communication
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
christym@mail.utexas.edu
Increasingly, engineering educators recognize the pedagogical value of student projects. Although exams, class exercises, and homework can effectively measure a student’s mastery of facts and formulas, these sorts of assessment tools do not encourage students to develop their analytical capabilities, nor do they measure a student’s ability to understand and apply what he or she has learned. Projects, in contrast, allow educators to emphasize, “the important role that experience plays in the learning process” (Kolb1). In an endeavor to foster projects in our classes, the Mechanical Engineering Department at UT has initiated PROject CEntered Education, PROCEED (Schmidt and Beaman2), which is intended to encourage both teachers and students to focus more on course projects, is a multi-faceted, department-wide program involving curricular innovations at all levels. The backbone of those innovations is a web-based portfolio system that allows students to document their educational progress. The PROCEED portfolio system provides students with a format to record their course work, present projects, and evaluate their own educational progress.