Introductory Overview

This PLC has a rather long history of evolution. And it is still evolving almost daily. We conceive of the effort as a cooperative enterprise among disciplines and among student, faculty, and staff. Our aim is to build a learning community that explores the full range of methods of acquiring fundamental knowledge. Projects will provide a powerful entry into basic knowledge, but they cannot provide everything necessary. Students will undoubtedly have to supplement project learning with outside experience gained through electronic aids or periodic course visits. At every turn we intend to help students in that quest, whether by direction to outside lectures, or electronic resources, or by intensive one-on-one instruction by faculty and peer learning associates. The focus remains on building independent, yet team-oriented, learning skills, however, not on passive absorption of course-delivered material.

The projects will illustrate the most central of the operations listed in the outcomes gates, and provide perspective on the disciplines, on the historical evolution of the thinking, and the historical application of that thought process to a variety of real-world concerns. The projects will also open the most difficult and fundamental issues about academic inquiry and human life.

Teams of about four to five students who will address some broader and longer term projects (Galileo, and Faraday, and perhaps the issue of massive dams -- Hoover in the U.S., Itaipu in Brazil, the proposed 3 Gorges in China, -- Robert Goddard's work in the history of American rocketry and its application in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003).

The hallmark of a WPI education is the extensive project experience at the junior and senior year. The PLC is a very deliberate experiment to establish whether that hallmark experience can be applied to fundamental or basic knowledge, so that WPI students will not have to wait for the most distinctive part of their WPI education. We think it can and we need your help. Let's together build a new kind of learning community.

Project-based Learning Community
Worcester Polytechnic Institute - 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609-2280
Phone: +1-508-831-5215 - Fax: +1-508-831-5485 - plc@wpi.edu