“What keeps you awake at night?” Amitava Babi Mitra wants to know of his audience, which comprises mainly lecturers and policy officers. He draws a couple of hesitant answers. According to Mitra, director of New Engineering Education Transformation, it almost has to be that your students stop turning up and lose interest in your course. And that is precisely one of the reasons why the pilot program has been established. “We are high in the rankings, we attract enough students, so it's not something we have to do,” the MIT director says. So why? The answer from the audience, ‘because you want the best for the student,’ is right on target.

“The first year is for many students a disaster. They get bored and can't envisage the purpose for which they have to learn something.” With pictures of an aircraft and a drone, he shows how students are not yet learning about the new machines; they are still learning mostly about the ‘old’ ones. The pilot project that has been started (“I don't call it an experiment; that sounds so creepy”) is intended to help the students regain their enthusiasm, prevent dropout, and prepare them better for the future. The students, who can fit the project into their curriculum, learn, among other things, how to think more independently and critically. They also acquire knowledge about new machines and they work on certain cases in a project-based way that extends beyond the boundaries of their program. Think of making a robot from scratch, says Mitra by way of illustration. To date, the student experience has been positive and they are particularly enthusiastic about working with others and the amount of time being invested in them, according to the director. Greater flexibility and more projects are suggestions for improvement.