Student Engagement in a Project-based Electricity and Magnetism course

Despite the relevance of science in engineering, sometimes engineering students do not see the connection of physics courses to their field of study. As an alternative, a project based course was designed to engage them into the subject. The course starts by defining a set of projects from which they can choose. In each of them, they have to apply the concepts seen in the course to build the final prototype. The main project deliverables are: a first report in which they detail how will they build their prototype and the physics concepts implied, a second videoreport (youtube) in which they show their first test and finally an oral presentation and demonstration of the working prototype in front of the class. Qualitative results from interviews show that students feel more motivated since they relate the course to the real world and other areas of engineering.