Students teaching students: Engineering 100

This paper describes an orientation course every first year student entering the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign participates in during the first six weeks of class, fall semester. The program is unique in that it is entirely organized and taught by third and fourth year engineering students, each of which facilitates one or two sections of the course, known as Engineering 100. Although the sections group students by department, much of the material in the course covers other areas as well, ranging from campus health services to web page construction. This paper will first provide an overview of the content and structure of the Engineering 100 program from the perspective of a first year student, then from the perspective of a student facilitator, and finally from an administrative point of view. In addition, it is a goal of this paper to convey some of the educational philosophy that has driven this program forward over the last six years and, in our opinion, made it so successful.