Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning Activities with Miniproject Development Towards Enhancing The Undergraduate Engineering Skills

Modern education in engineering requires the lectures and syllabus to be an effective and innovative. This is in the point of view to produce high talented and creative engineers in providing solutions to the industries and communities. With regard to that, a study on the effectiveness of developing miniproject in the Embedded Design and Interfacing course has been conducted. This study was intended to measure the students' satisfaction on the teaching and learning activities implemented throughout the course towards their success in the miniproject and engineering skills development. A survey was distributed to the students taking this course in Semester March - June 2017 in Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA. It was found that, 60% of the overall students chose the lab session conducted during face-to-face lecture as the most effective method of teaching and learning activities that is able to help them in developing a good miniproject. Other activites conducted throughout the semester is shown to be significant as minimum of 30% of the overall students stated that the activities are the most effective method. Upon completion of the miniproject, more than 60 students have a thought that they had develop a very good engineering skills which include planning and organisation skills, hand-eye coordination, ability to undertake detailed and elaborate work, ability to identify, analyse and solve problems and enjoy computing and technical design. A comparative study which analyse the result of Question 3 from Test 1 and Test 2 indicated that, the programming skill for 80% and 44% students from class EE241S6B and EE241M6C respectively obtained higher Test 2 marks as compared to Test 1. Hence it can be concluded that the miniproject can help to enhance the student's programming skill.