This paper presents the experiences of conducting course of mechatronics design project using project-based learning approach for last two semesters since the author had been trained in ASU. The advantages as well as the feasibility of this approach have been proved by not only student success and but teacher expectations. Besides the benefit, the paper also presents some drawbacks may occur during and after using this method for a long period.

First of all, since each project was well-defined by teacher, students in group know clearly what they are going to do, meanwhile teacher directs student going through certain levels in the cognitive domain by designing the indicators to measure their performance. Secondly, even though the teacher has the project framework from staring to the end, it is not showed and students have to seat together to discuss how to acquire knowledge, tools to finish the given project. Students therefore find that working in group is really help now then, and teacher leaves some degree of freedom for student voice. Thirdly, asking questions and finding the answer by themselves is always encouraged so that students were aware of life-long learning; i.e. managing their learning in the information booming time. English usage during acquiring and absorbing information showed it helpful because students have to understand at least principle of elements and/or components they are going to use in the project. The other benefit of this approach during implementation phase is that the teacher prepares for students enough materials to guarantee that the project would be completed and assign for them the mission, but students feel free to find different ways to get the assigned target. From that point students showed up more and more creative. Many students founds useful tools for their work that sometimes the teacher got surprised. For example, with the CNC machine design project, instead of using standard software package, student found that when going to manufacture a work piece, the machine picks up the G-code randomly, they learn extensively and solve the problem by using other software which can allow to brush up the code order before sending to the machine controller. Last but not least for the advantages of this method is that at a laboratory scale the project is sometimes considered as an initial design, but when the students feel more confident with the project, they can extend the project to as a research with industry scale and can ask financial support from university. In last two semesters two groups won this kind of support and they had a chance to develop complete product.

For the disadvantages, first of all there should be some teaching assistants at the project laboratory to help students when they come to work without the present of the teacher, for example the hour of self-study. Secondly, the facilities to support students to complete their project sometimes go to be limited, especially when students generate a good idea but not enough means for them to try. Thirdly, when applying Bloom?s Taxonomy for measuring the individual performance it took a lot of time to qualify and mark. The last point of drawback is that if those assigned projects used for many classes, students go to passive, creative encouragement gets a decay. Thinking a new solution for that, the blended instructional method have been applied recently in which some projects start from problem based in order to update the number of projects in the laboratory.