Abstract
Project-based learning is one of the popular and promising approaches in engineering education. The current study reports on a curriculum that was designed and implemented by a graduate school to help students gain knowledge and creative thinking skills through collaboration between different majors during industrial projects in a graduate course on home appliance engineering. The students selected the topics, planned the project, conducted research, produced a prototype, and presented their results under the guidance of a group of advisors consisting of professors, technical advisors, and industry mentors. A quantitative analysis showed that this approach was effective in improving the students’ attitude toward engineering. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis showed that this learning method helped students learn how to communicate and present effectively, to flexibly approach projects, and to understand the practices of industrial research. Based on the findings, the current study discusses how the project-based learning helped students advance.
Introduction
Donald A. Schön performed seminal and profound research on professional education and argued that reflection-in-action is thinking about what professionals are doing while they are doing it. 1 It is clear that engineering requires such epistemology of practice more than any other field. As a way to have reflection-in-action, Schön emphasized the combination of teaching applied science with coaching and learning by doing. 2 Such a suggestion coincides with the UNESCO report, “Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development,” in terms of engineering education. This report emphasizes project-based learning or problem-based learning (PBL) as a promising approach of engineering education. 3 Furthermore, professionals in engineering deal with much scientific and engineering knowledge, which doubles every 10 years. 4 To have a clear understanding of such knowledge, PBL has been widely used in engineering education, where it has been increasingly popular. 5
PBL is a model that organizes learning around projects. 6 Students are involved in a project and have an understanding of knowledge through the involvement with responsibility in designing and enacting their learning activities. 7 PBL was developed in the medical field in the middle of the 1950s. 8 Medical schools used PBL as a way to replace the traditional lecture-style instruction. Since then, PBL has been adopted in various fields, such as business, education, law, and engineering education.9–12 The practices of PBL differ from institution to institution and from country to country. The scale of implementation also remains diverse, ranging from a lecture level to an integrated part of the curriculum, or as a complete curriculum system. Positive effects of PBL have been reported in terms of students learning. PBL is effective for enhancing undergraduate students’ achievements in engineering school.13,14 PBL also offers opportunities to engineering students to have authentic learning about energy and momentum. 15 PBL provides more productive learning process because it includes a specific application as well as the intention of making knowledge relevant to application. 16 Furthermore, PBL students are more motivated to develop effective self-directed learning strategies in medical school. 17 PBL also helps students increase their consideration about interdisciplinary knowledge and skills for engineering education. 18 PBL is a learning philosophy, and different drivers, facing diverse challenges, and involving different actors trigger its implementation in engineering education. 19 PBL improves students’ attitudes about engineering, motivation to learn information and communication technology, and participation in engineering education.20–23 Although PBL is challenging to make an implementation in electrical engineering education,24,25 it is valuable to design and enact it in higher education.
However, such interest is often limited to the undergraduate level. Unlike traditional assumptions, such as “graduate school is supposed to prepare graduate students to become professors,” many people with master’s or doctoral degrees in engineering work in industrial fields, which requires capabilities to work with focus on projects, which are sequences of tasks required to research objectives. The objective is to design a device or process that has value to a customer. The project begins by defining a performance problem associated with an application and ends with a design solution. The problem drives the learning required to complete the project. Managing the project requires engineers to explain effective teamwork, to have clear communication, and to balance the social and economic impacts of the project. In other words, graduate school is not only for the promise of academic job opportunities but also for gaining a wider range of employment, not just academia. 26 Furthermore, considering academic features in a graduate school, research hinges on cognitive complexity and the use of higher-order thinking skills. 27 Apparently, without analysis and synthesis, not anyone can perform research. Becoming a scholar demands higher-order thinking, and the process of learning to do so is related to apprenticeship and scaffolding. 28 PBL is based on particular tasks called projects. Whether or not academia or industrial fields are the goal, PBL is a valuable strategy in graduate schools in engineering.
The current study reports on how a course on electric home appliances in a graduate school was planned and implemented with PBL. Although some studies reported pedagogical approaches in home appliance engineering,29–31 research on this approach still needs more efforts in order to improve the quality of education in home appliance engineering. The current study would provide one of critical suggestions in this area. Furthermore, this study also presents the methodology and materials to analyze the both quantitative and qualitative effects of PBL in a graduate course in terms of students’ attitudes toward engineering. This paper help lectures who plan to used PBL in graduate courses by providing course overview and analysis tools.
Course description
Course overview
A project-based course named “Smart Appliance Convergence Project” has been offered in a graduate school to help students acquire new skills, learn knowledge, and improve their creativity while working on a project in home appliance engineering. This course has been offered each fall semester in the graduate school since 2018, and the graduate students voluntarily register for the courses. The students in this course are from various majors and team up for projects on topics that meet the needs of the home appliance industry. They are also expected to learn through the process of selecting topics themselves, planning a project, conducting research, completing prototype products, and presenting results. This 3-credit course consists of 15 weeks of activities, and the research topics for each team are basically from companies in the home appliance industry.
Participating companies and their role
The participating companies include a global home appliances maker, a home appliance controller company, a home appliance materials company, and a home appliance AI-service development company. The companies provide the students with research topics or research requests for proposals (RFPs), industry mentors, and research facilities if necessary.
Students and project team building
The registered students come from the electrical, electronics, computer, mechanical, and material engineering departments. The students are asked to team up in groups of two or three students, and each team has to have students from two or more different majors. Each team is assigned a group of advisors consisting of academic advisors, a technical advisor, and an industry mentor, as shown in Figure 1. The academic advisors are professors from the departments of the students on the team. The technical advisors help students in conducting experiments and building a prototype. The industry mentors are the writers of the research RFPs that the students choose. They also provide consulting to the students from an industry point of view.

Team structure in PBL course and assigned advisors.
Financial and technical support
Each team is provided with financial and technical support. Each team has a research fund of 4000 USD for conducting research. The students are also provided with non-curricular programs, such as training in 3D printing, CAD, micro-processors, and technical advice from the technical advisors and industry mentors. As a research incentive, the best team receives an award with a travel fund for the CES exhibition.
Course schedule
The course schedule is shown in Table 1. The lecturers and mentors from industry start the schedule five weeks before the semester starts to prepare and finalize the RFPs. Several RFPs are proposed by the companies, and about 15–20 of them are finally chosen to be provided to the students. At one week before the semester begins, lecturers and students have a course orientation, and RFPs are presented to the students. Each student chooses a desired RFP title and submits it to the lecturers. At the first class in the semester, students team up on their own based on the RFPs that they are interested in.
Course schedule.
In the next week, each team submits an initial proposal, and a group of advisors is assigned to the team. The group of advisors includes professors, a technical advisor, and an industry mentor. In the third week, students visit the companies to see engineering problems related to their RFPs and receive the feedback on the proposal from the industry mentor. In the following week, each team submits a revised proposal to the advisors.
During weeks 5 to 14, each team performs research under the guidance of the advisors. In week 9, the students present midterm results and write midterm reports. In week 15, the students present final results and submit final reports. All students are required to attend to an event for the public presentation of their results called “Tech Demo Day.” The best team is awarded at the event.
Representative case
One of the representative cases of this course is shown in Figure 2. The RFP was from a global home appliances maker, and the main objective of this research was to develop a method to detect the amount of frost on a heat exchanger to use in an algorithm for the frequency adaptation of a defrost cycle. Two mechanical engineering students and a computer engineering student built a team and proposed optical methods for detecting the amount of frost. They built an experimental set and collected data for research.

A representative case.
The amount of frost is measured by a scale, and sequential images of frost on the heat exchanger are recorded with a camera when the heat pump is operating. The students used methods based on color image detection and subtraction images. Both methods were experimentally proven to be effective, particularly when the heat exchanger is partially covered with frost. In the final report, the students concluded that the subtraction image method would be their suggestion for the frost detection algorithm because its performance was more robust than the color-based method under changing light conditions.
Data and analysis
In the current study, data were collected and analyzed in 2018 and 2019. There was a group of 21 students in the 2018 PBL course and 21 students from non-PBL courses in 2018. There was another group of 16 students in a 2019 PBL course and a group of 15 students from non-PBL courses in 2019. In total, there were 37 students in the PBL groups and 36 students in the non-PBL groups. There were 30 male students and 7 female students in the PBL groups, and there were 34 male students and 2 female students in the non-PBL groups. There were four doctoral students and 33 master’s degree students in the PBL groups, and there were 8 doctoral students and 28 master’s degree students in the non-PBL groups. The students in non-PBL groups volunteered for the data collection as control groups and were also graduate students at the same university.
To examine the effectiveness of the PBL using a quantitative measure, a survey on student attitudes towards engineering was used, as shown in Figure 3. 32 This survey includes 30 items with a five-level Likert scale, where a five indicates strong agreement. Each item holds statistical independence, which is beneficial for examining attitude accurately. The survey was given to all students to fill out at the beginning and the end of each semester. A t-test was used to compare differences in students’ attitudes toward engineering.

The attitude survey to engineering. The headings SD/D/N/A/SA appeared as Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree and Strongly Agree in the survey completed by the students.
A qualitative analysis was used to identify the features of PBL courses that influence students’ attitudes towards engineering. Five students who took PBL courses volunteered to have interviews with questions such as, “Can you tell me a little about yourself?” “What was your project in the PBL course?” “What did you learn through your project?” “What would be the strengths and weakness of this course?” “How was working with your colleagues in your project?” “What were your advisors’ comments on doing your project?” “What does this PBL course contribute to help you be a professional engineer?” Each interview took around 20 minutes. A case study design was used to collect qualitative data. 33 An inductive thematic method was used to analyze the data.34,35 This study reports the features that students recognized as powerful in the PBL courses that they took that were different from other courses.
Results
Quantitative analysis
PBL was effective in improving students’ attitudes towards engineering. In 2018, there was no statistically significant difference in the scores of the attitudes survey in the PBL group and non-PBL group at the beginning of the semester, as shown in Table 2. However, there was a statistically significant difference in the scores between groups at the end of the semester, when the average attitudes towards engineering in the PBL group was higher than that of the non-PBL group. Similar results were found in 2019 as well. Table 3 reports the results of the two years in total. At the beginning of the semester, students in both groups had similar attitudes to engineering, but the attitudes to engineering of the PBL group were higher than those of non-PBL group at the end of the semester. Figure 4 is a box plot that graphically depict the quartiles of the data used in Table 3 and shows overall patterns of students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and in non-PBL groups respectively. At the end of semester, the box plot for non-PBL groups moves down, which means students’ attitudes toward engineering in these groups were getting worse. However, at the same time, the box plot for PBL groups are higher than the equivalent plot for non-PBL groups, which means students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups were getting better. This graph shows that PBL could develop students’ attitudes toward engineering.
T-test results comparing students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and Non-PBL groups in 2018 and in 2019.
**p<.01.
T-test results comparing students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and Non-PBL groups.
**p<.01.

Students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL Group and Non-PBL Group. The box is bounded by the first and third quartiles. The line inside the box is the second quartile (median), and the whiskers extend to the minimum and maximum scores for each set of data.
An analysis was done according to students’ gender and degree level to examine the change of their attitude toward engineering in each group. Table 4 shows the t-test results for on each gender. Male students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups were similar to those in non-PBL groups at the beginning of the semesters, but they had better attitude toward engineering in PBL groups than non-PBL groups at the end of the semesters. However, attitudes of female students in PBL groups and in non-PBL groups were statistically similar at both the beginning and the end of the semester. In PBL groups, the scores of male students were less than the scores of female students at the beginning of the semester. At the end of the semester, their scores were similar. There was a statistically significant difference in the scores for male students in PBL groups at the beginning of the semesters (M = 104.67, SD = 10.14) and at the end of the semesters (M = 112.63, SD = 7.47); t(58) = −3.46, p = 0.001. However, there were no statistically significant differences in the scores for male students in non-PBL groups, female students in non-PBL groups, and female students in PBL groups throughout the semesters. This result seems to show that a group with low attitude toward engineering has been improved through the PBL. Table 5 shows the t-test results for students studying for master’s and doctoral degrees. There was no statistically difference between the groups at the beginning of the semesters, but there was a statistically difference in the scores of master’s degree students in PBL groups and in those in non-PBL groups. However, doctoral students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and in non-PBL groups were statistically similar at both the beginning and the end of the semesters. Doctoral students in PBL groups improved their attitudes toward engineering throughout the PBL.
T-test results comparing male students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and Non-PBL groups and female students’ attitudes in both groups.
**p<.01.
T-test results comparing master degree students’ attitudes toward engineering in PBL groups and Non-PBL groups and doctoral students’ attitudes in both groups.
**p<.01.
In summary, PBL courses apparently had a positive influence on improving the students’ attitudes toward engineering. The influence was powerful for male students and master’s degree students, which had relatively low attitudes toward engineering.
Qualitative analysis
Student-interviews provided the learners’ perspectives and experiences about PBL courses. In the interviews, five features were prominent: expanding areas of knowledge, pursing goals of projects in unstrained conditions, having opportunities to communicate with professionals, having collaboration with colleagues with different fields, and understanding what the industrial field demands.
Expanding areas of knowledge
Most interviewees talked about researching topics that they had not studied. What they said is as follows:
My main and only research area is noise and vibration… I learned what I was not familiar with from this course, and it will help me expand my knowledge… I had a chance to participate in unfamiliar but interesting research that is totally different from what I usually do. This course provided a valuable experience to me. Through this course, I experienced a field that I have not known. It was just a short time, but my team succeeded in the project. It was not a field that I have worked on, but I found my knowledge can be applied in different areas in different ways. I can find such things in this course.
Being in graduate school often means joining a laboratory that investigates a very specific field. Such a system helps graduate students be involved in the academic field easily and quickly. However, such involvement could build a barrier to other opportunities to research different topics. Having professionalism indicates being in a very specific field based on students’ motivation and consideration in graduate school. Nonetheless, the students in this course have considerable satisfaction with just having experience in a different field in terms of research.
Pursing goals of projects in unstrained conditions
One of the major pressures that graduate students have is making academic results, which often makes them be severe in their reasoning about their research and in their relationships with their advisors and colleagues. However, the PBL students had more liberal situations in conducting research in the PBL course than their research required for their degrees in anticipating, implementing, and developing their ideas. The interviewees said the following:
One of my favorite things in this course is not taking the topic so seriously. I do not mean my team was not serious. I was very flexible in doing the research with guidance from the lecturer (technical advisor). His guidance was good to keep the direction of the project, but my colleagues and I just freely and deliberately approached, designed, and experimented with the ideas. In the lab, I am obligated to have fast performance toward very specific purposes. But in this course, I had many discussions with my colleagues in a flexible environment. I loved it. My team had three members, and we worked corporately and flexibly. Such work was different from what I have done in my lab. I enjoyed working with my three colleagues because we were not in stressful situations to have good performance. It was nice.
Apparently, while the advisors in each project offered basic guidance and advised having appropriate progress, the students in this course did their own projects in unstrained conditions, so they had opportunities to investigate and approach the project more flexibly, unlike their lab situations. Such an experience would give more diverse and extended creative situations, and it turns into satisfaction and confidence to extend their academic capability.
Having opportunities to communicate with professionals
The course included two presentations from all students and advisors in this course. As mentioned, all of them had different academic backgrounds, and the presenters made efforts to have good presentations because the scores were critical to receiving tickets to CES. This prize was attractive to all students, but they also considered these presentations as different learning opportunities unlike meetings with their advisors in their labs. The interviewees said the following:
I have weekly meetings in my lab. The meetings go fast because we share how all projects go, and my colleagues would like to receive more comments from the advisor. I ask my advisor several questions about my research, and he gives me some comments and guides the direction. Then, I follow up and study what he commented on. But in presentations for this course, I had to present my research to professors and students who are not in my field. They sometimes asked strange questions. In that situation, I helped them understand what I have done. I was careful to select terms to respond to them rather than using professional terms that are familiar to me. I also focused on simple and understandable slides for this situation (the interviewer asked, “How was it? It was useful?”) It made me think deeply about my work and presentations. At that time, I spent more time and effort to prepare for the presentations than other typical presentations. Now I think it was helpful to me. It helped me develop as a researcher. I learned how to persuade the audience. I just graduated from college. In the presentations, some professors in the audience were instructors in the courses that I took. I was a little bit embarrassed to just present my work to them. After this course, I gained some confidence for this kind of presentation. Now I have experience to present my work to professionals. Well, company staff is now an easy audience to me. Yes, I became confident from this course.
The presentations in this course were aimed at checking on and assessing the progress of each project. The students responded to these presentations as a way to answer questions such as, “what are you learning?” and, “How are you learning it?” Therefore, the students were required to think carefully about how to present their work to an audience that does not have professional knowledge. They were asked to observe their work with higher-order thinking rather than just reporting specific results in lab meetings, which is a meta-cognitive approach. 36 Metacognition is thinking about thinking, and the two questions, “What are you learning?” and, “How are you learning?” generally initiate metacognition. 37
Unlike typical presentations, the audience is not familiar with the work that the students have done and seems to critically motivate the students’ metacognitive approach. Selecting easy words and creating simple and understandable slides are strategies that the students used. Gaining confidence in such embarrassing situations also would lead to an attitude that they are proficient to determine and demonstrate their research meta-cognitively.
Having collaboration with colleagues with different fields
This course basically made teams with graduate students from different majors. Therefore, the students worked with colleagues who have different academic backgrounds. An interviewee said the following:
I was the only one who has worked on mechanical engineering in my team. The other two team members were from computer engineering. I studied thermodynamics as an undergraduate, so I gathered resources and explained to my colleagues what radiation is, how to measure it, etc. One colleague made a DAQ board, and then we collected the data. The other colleague analyzed and calculated the data. We collaborated on the project and it worked well.
Having the experience to work with colleagues in multi-disciplinary teams is one of criteria for accreditation in engineering education. 38 Such an environment requires collective thinking by a team, and collective thinking in a cross-disciplinary setting depends on the facility with which collaborators are able to learn and understand each other’s perspectives. 39 One of the principles in this PBL was having a team do a project to have students work collaboratively, which seemed to be implemented adequately.
Understanding what the industrial field demands
Experiencing industrial demands is one of the purposes of this course. All projects were based on RFPs from the companies, and each team submitted proposals and gained advice from industry mentors. The curriculum was intended to offer students experience with how the industrial field works. Students talked about it as follows:
I took a course about smart electronics a few years ago, but I did not recognize industrial fields. In this course, I specifically practiced ways of analysis used in a company. I could see how industrial fields are working a little bit. Within a budget, my team was obligated to make progress for the project. We made efforts to have good presentation slides, and it was important. Such pressure was totally different from academic research, and it was nice to experience the whole process.
Discussion
The current study planned and implemented PBL for a course on electric home appliances in a graduate school, and quantitative analysis proved that such efforts improved the students’ attitudes towards engineering. Furthermore, PBL was powerful for a group with low attitude toward engineering, such as male students and master’s degree students. Qualitative analysis from the interviews showed other effects of PBL in terms of students’ capabilities to collaboratively function on multi-disciplinary teams, to communicate and present effectively, to flexibly approach and think about projects, and to understand and experience practices of an industrial field. These are all skills and knowledge that engineering education should pursue. 3
Carefully designing curriculum is critical for a PBL course in a graduate school. There are two points in this curriculum. An advisor team, which consists of academic professors, a technical professor, and an industry mentor, is assigned to each project team according to features of a project. These three different advisors have their own separate roles that help each project team to gain diverse advice and supports. The industry mentor assigns the RFP and lets the project team recognize what the industry needs and how it works and cooperates. The technical professor helps the project to proceed by having weekly meetings. Academic professors assess the project’s progress overall and provides important references as well. Another point is setting up schedules specifically in a semester and letting all students know the schedules and what is expected.
These efforts to design and set up the curriculum help sustain and administrate the semester schedules stably. Specific schedules for goals, such as submitting proposals, presenting intermediate results and final results to all advisors, and presenting work to the public, are critical to each team. As shown in the qualitative results, these schedules are important opportunities to have communication with diverse scholars and people, and to make such an assignment, each team works collaboratively. Designing a curriculum involves deciding what kinds of learning opportunities are offered to students. 40 Offering opportunities to learn reflection-in-action requires the collaboration of advisors from different roles as well. 1 Having these specific curricula with a collaborative advisor team is important for planning a PBL course in a graduate school for electronics.
Emphasis on the process rather than the results is important to enact the PBL curriculum in a graduate school. Although the RFPs were projects focused on consumer products and business tasks with a small grant, the process of each project was very flexible. As one of the features shown in interviews, students can do their project collaboratively with colleagues without any constraints, but they were maintained systemically by the advisor team. The advisor team did not give any pressure to gain the best outcomes, but they focused the direction of the progress on the proposals. This is a very unusual and unique situation in a graduate school.
The PBL in this study offers a different kind of experience in graduate school that can trigger the students’ cognitive flexibility. In general, the aim in graduate school is to be a professional in a very specific field. Graduate students in engineering schools are generally apprenticed to an academic advisor in a certain lab, and such an environment often makes stressful situations to make publications, obtain technical patents, or gain degrees. The current system of a graduate school has its own strong points for such purposes, but the stress causes impaired creativity.41,42 Therefore, the PBL course of the current study offers a different learning environment as a way to let the graduate students approach a project differently and flexibly. The ability to think flexibly is useful in fostering efficient problem solving and creativity. 43 A graduate school is also responsible for helping students improve their creativity, and PBL can be a specific curriculum that a graduate school plans and implements.
Conclusions
PBL would be beneficial for improving graduate students’ attitudes toward engineering in an engineering school. This was done by setting up a curriculum with collaborative advisor teams and specific schedules to have valuable learning opportunities in terms of reflection-in-action. The curriculum also focused on the process of projects to improve the students’ cognitive flexibility. Such a PBL course can be applied in other engineering schools as well, and research with this effort in different engineering programs will strengthen a power of PLB for engineering school students. This research would offer the elaborated version of PBL research in engineering education.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by Next Generation Engineering Researcher Program of National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT (2017H1D8A2032450).
