Introducing freshmen students to hands-on experience in engineering design

Educational methods applying the traditional disciplinary boundaries are no longer adequate to solve the industrial expectations of today. The recommendations on engineering education suggested by various researchers and reported in this paper were implemented by the author in an introductory course for freshmen students and the findings are reported in this paper. The power of person-to-person contact with the students and the synergetics between peers is evident: an environment where students work by doing research together with the academic staff, provide the new will-be-graduates with the skills needed to cope with the changes we are expecting to face in the coming century.