In the project, we were able to offer students of mechanical engineering the opportunity to explore intensively with physical machine components already in their first year of study. For this purpose, we set up a voluntary laser cutter course for all interested first-year students, in which the students were able to produce and assemble the components for a running planetary gear themselves. In a second course, several student teams also disassembled real machine components to analyse how they work and finally present the results in the lecture hall.

In the laser cutter course we decided to make and assemble a planetary gear. We designed a planetary gear suitable for the project and worked out the corresponding blueprints and instructions. For the laser cutter course we used the workshop in the ETH main building, which has space for about four students. To meet the high demand, we increased the offer from initially two days to five days per week. Each course was supervised by two teaching assistants. We used the ETH Moodle platform to coordinate the more than 300 course participants per semester. Several new machine components were acquired for the disassembly courses. In addition to various hand-held power tools, we now also have various gearboxes as used in bicycles, passenger cars and trucks. For the disassembly courses we were able to use the workshop in the LEO Loft of the ETH. Individual weekly working hours were agreed with the 4-5 student teams, during which they were able to dismantle and examine the machine components - also supervised by an assistant. In one of the last lectures of the semester, the teams then presented their results to their fellow students.

We consider this Innovedum project as an important and pathbreaking step in the design of our current and future teaching activities. We are convinced that hands-on elements offer a clear didactic value in order to better understand complex topics and to link theoretical learning content more closely with practical implementation examples. As expected, the main challenge is to cope with the high number of students. In this project, we were able to show that a careful coordination of content, didactic and organisational aspects is particularly necessary in order to initially reach and ultimately inspire as many students as possible. In the laser cutter courses we conducted evaluations in which students were able to rate and comment on various aspects of the course. The courses were rated positively overall (average 4.1 out of 5). The support from the assistants was considered particularly helpful (4.4 out of 5), but only part of the students have the confidence to operate the laser cutters without assistance after the course (3.3 out of 5). Many expressed the wish that we continue with the course and even expand it in the future. After the disassembly courses, we asked the participants for their feedback. It turned out that the courses could already be implemented well for the rather small number of students. However, an expansion of the courses for significantly more participants is hardly possible at the moment due to the limited infrastructure. All students rated the experience of analysing a specific machine component in detail as very positive. However, it was also often mentioned that they would have preferred to analyse several different components (across the semester) in order to gain a larger overview of possible solutions.