Assessing students' motivation, learning, and skill transferability in a real-world project: Insights from the ETH Assistive Technology Challenge

Abstract

Challenge-based learning addresses socially relevant real-world challenges and requires students to work closely together with stakeholders in a highly engaging and interdisciplinary manner. The newly established ‘Assistive Technology Challenge’ course at ETH Zurich promotes challenge-based learning by exposing Health Sciences and Technology students to diverse disciplines and skills of importance in the field of assistive technology. During the course, the students without an engineering background work together with a person with a physical disability to (co-)develop a personal technical solution for an individual challenge that the person encounters in their own daily life or during leisure activities. This work describes the course format, student assessment, and outcomes of the first edition of the course executed during the spring semester 2024. Further, it describes the outcomes of an online survey collecting students' feedback on the course and investigates how the chosen course format affected the learned competencies and students' motivation. Results show that the course format enabled students to achieve a successful project outcome, promoted high student motivation, and strengthened their competencies in areas expected to be relevant for their future careers.