But — make no mistake — no matter how well a team works together or how much fun they manage to have, the concepts needed to finish the EGGG101 tasks are difficult — spatial visualization, budding engineers will tell you, is not for the faint of heart. When a topic becomes a little too tricky, students can rely on their peer leaders, veterans of the course assigned to mentor individual groups. These upperclassmen provide guidance on everything from confounding math problems to broader questions about college life, like how to register for classes or, even, where on campus to go for the best post-exam lunch splurge. 

“It is all about creating a sense of community early on,” said Alexandra Zurzolo, a junior Honors mechanical engineering major who served as a peer mentor in Malladi’s class during the fall of 2021.  “There are many things I wish I’d known as a first-year student, so I welcome the opportunity to offer that advice. I make a point to learn everyone’s name, and I encourage the students to feel comfortable asking questions, because that is how you learn. The peer mentors are always looking to help.” 

Even with this climate of support, projects sometimes go awry. Engineering, after all, is a field built on trial and error — emphasis on error. So if a group’s final puzzle product falls apart into more of a, well, puzzling mess? Learning objectives (and a decent grade) can still be obtained.

“One hundred percent of the time, I do not expect a prototype to be perfect,” Malladi said. “That would be an almost impossible thing. The goal of the class is, rather, to learn from your mistakes, document what you’ve done and define what the path forward is for a future iteration. What would the students change the next time around, if they had the opportunity? Is moving forward with this design even viable? Sometimes, as an engineer, it is making the decision to stop that is the important thing.”

This permission to not be perfect — to not censor themselves as they dream up big ideas — is one of the takeaways Malladi hopes her students carry with them throughout their academic careers and beyond.

For Angeletakis, this mentality has proven helpful every time she starts feeling overwhelmed listening to more senior engineering students at UD discuss their current projects, like designing a breathing machine for COVID-19 patients or — a particularly intimidating prospect — building a bicycle from scratch.

“This class has taught me that I can get there, too,” she said. “And it has taught me that I won’t be doing it alone.” 

Last summer, Malladi was selected as one of six Provost Teaching Fellows at UD. Provost Teaching Fellows partner with the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning to transform the UD first-year experience to better support and engage undergraduates at scale. Fellows’ collective goal is to create foundational courses that use the most effective strategies for teaching and actively engaging students in the learning process.