SLU is excited to be a lead participating University in the emerging national movement to transform undergraduate education in engineering (TUEE). This program is a radical shift from lectures and other forms of traditional passive learning featuring a very collaborative student-centered active learning model with interdisciplinary, team-based, open-ended problem solving and project learning involving real-world situations. The projects that our student’s participate in come from real customers and real potential employers, throughout their undergraduate experience. The program addresses diversity and inclusion issues by design, making these benefits available to all the participating students. The TUEE Collaboratory model fosters a student-centered, professional practice experiential learning environment for transforming undergraduate education in engineering/computer science. SLU’s first cohort of 40 students will graduate in 2026.

The Current Situation

Sample Lead University is excited to be joining the likes of Harvey Mudd College and Olin College of Engineering in offering student-centered, active project learning throughout the undergraduate experience. As a large University, our participation brings the benefits of this program to many more students that it would previously have been available for.

The Problem

At large universities, such as SLU a significant challenge to a program such as this one has been that of capacity (numbers of faculty) to provide adequate coaching and mentoring for the various projects, programs, activities, and events required to implement student-centered active project learning throughout the undergraduate experience for each student.

The Solutions

Innovative Features | Operating Framework | Strategic Partners

Engaging Alumni

To solve this capacity problem, through the TUEE Collaboratory, SLU is engaging its own alumni as the source of practicing professionals and recent retirees to collaborate with administrators, faculty, staff and students. Alumni participate in mentoring the students in the program.

Establish Strategic Partners

To date, SLU has establish a relationship with four founding Strategic Corporate Partners (SCPs). These SCPs are major local companies employing hundreds of SLU alumni with engineering and IT backgrounds that live in the local metropolitan area (data can easily be found on LinkedIn with a profile on each alum). The SLU Alumni Chapters have been established with each of the SCPs. SLU is also engaging partnering with local professional chapters of national professional societies (ACM, ASEE, ASME, IEEE) and diversity organizations (AISES, MAES, NSBE, SACNAS, SHPE, SWE) working through our alumni members.

Student Professional Practice Scholars (SPPS)

The SPPS is a diverse cohort of second and third-year honors students majoring in BME, CpE, CS, EE, or ME with 3.0+ GPAs who will be attending our inaugural Day on Campus with Strategic Partners (SPs) event in November 2024. This SPPS cohort provides the student teams for all student-centered projects, programs, activities and events. Their efforts began with the start of the fall term in 2024 and will continue throughout this entire two-year project. The TUEE Collaboratory model is designed so that each student participates in many interdisciplinary student-centered team based open-ended problem solving activities and design projects throughout their undergraduate experience. The goal of the TUEE Collaboratory is that these students will enter their chosen professional workplace as amore skilled practicing engineer / computer scientist, particularly with work in teams and with interdisciplinary projects.