Open Challenges as a Way to Engage Students: an Experience Report from Three Undergraduate Courses

New approaches to problem-solving through crowdsourcing offer great potential for project-based learning opportunities in higher education. This experience report details how students in three upper-division courses were exposed to an open design challenge sponsored by NASA. Each course had a different level of involvement in the project, documented in the paper, which looks at different levels of involvement from the instructor's perspective. At the end of the semester, students reported on their engagement in the course as well as how these assignments compared to traditional ones. The findings support that open challenges, and NASA SUITS in particular, offer a great opportunity to engage students with computer programming.