Using Peer-Customers to Scalably Pair Student Teams with Customers for Hands-on Curriculum Final Projects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a peer-customer mechanism that pairs student teams with classmates to provide real-world project needs, enhancing practical experience in hands-on curriculum courses.

Contribution

It presents a scalable peer-customer approach for student-project pairing, including practical guidelines and insights from two course offerings.

Findings

Peer-customer mechanism improves student engagement with real-world problems

The approach is scalable and effective in introductory courses

Key observations support its broader applicability

Abstract

Peer-customer is a mechanism to pair student teams with customers in hands-on curriculum courses. Each student pitches a problem they want someone else in the class to solve for them. The use of peer-customers provides practical and scalable access for students to work with a customer on a real-world need for their final project. The peer-customer, despite being a student in the class, do not work on the project with the team. This dissociation forces a student team to practice customer needs assessment, testing, and surveying that can often be lacking in self-ideated final projects that do not have resources to curate external customers like in capstone courses. We prototyped the use of peer-customers in an introductory physical prototyping course focused on basic embedded systems design and python programming. In this paper, we present a practical guide on how best to use peer-customers, supported by key observations made during two separate offerings of the course with a total of N=64 students (N=29 Y1 and N=35 Y2).