Crazy Car Race contest: Multicourse design curricula in embedded system design

This paper reports on recent initiatives aimed at significantly enhancing the teaching of engineering design at the Westcoast University of Applied Sciences. A good design experience offers opportunities for learning to synthesize, solve, and utilize a given problem. Design problems should be open-ended, moderately difficult, and common to all groups. The outcome of creating a multicourse design project, with the intention of attending an international design contest (Crazy Car Race), is described. Students with different design experience have to work together to build a racing car which navigates a given route autonomously. The course structure, its placement in the regular curriculum, and the student and instructor's evaluation results are presented and discussed.