Enhancing Learning by Empowering Indian Students to Solve Engineering Challenges: An Effort by SPEED and IUCEE.

Engineering Education (EE) has become a notable topic of discussion in India. Faculties have initiated the dialogues long back and have been working for its improvement. The student fraternity has been introduced into the discussion, when SPEED (Student Platform for Engineering Education Development) entered India in 2009. From then, SPEED has evolved to create a marked change into the field of EE through development of numerous action plans by students. Students were empowered to face, plan and solve their local EE issues. More than twenty-five workshops have been conducted by SPEED focusing on various themes, which led to a nationwide presence and collaboration with IUCEE (Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education). With IUCEE's immense support, the national chapter of SPEED India was created in 2013. In 2013, SPEED India formulated a general theme on EE which aided in introducing the concept in detail to the student group. With the experimentation methodologies SPEED India have used so far and in moving forward in the current year of 2014, it chose to move this dialogue and developments in EE a step forward. Involving students into questioning, addressing and solving global engineering challenges would connect the different pedagogical methods such as problem based learning, experimental learning and community based learning into the learning culture. Seven workshops have been conducted with more than 500 engineering student participants and 100 action plans created under the theme of "Grand challenges of engineering in 21st century" as created by National Academy of Engineering (NAE), three major world issues: Access to Clean Water, Economical & Sustainable Energy and Removing barriers in urban infrastructure were addressed and action plans are created. This paper discusses the impact created by addressing to solve the grand challenges in engineering and the results of SPEED India's efforts in creating a new platform to enhance EE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]