Background: Working to enable a heightened sense of Connections between the theories of engineering principles to the practical product value delivered to customers, we dramatically modified our current class project in an undergraduate engineering statics course. We threaded interactive exercises adopted from The Kern Engineering Entrepreneurial Network (KEEN)'s Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) which focuses on three Cs of Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value.

Purpose/Hypothesis: Students reverse engineered a common handheld power tool in an Integrated Project approach to strengthen their Connections to other students in their course, connections between disparate subjects, their project Squads, and between their coursework and industry practice.

Design/Method: Using our Integrated Projects concept, we linked separate engineering courses in customer-supplier relationships. Students applied the tools and techniques from their specific courses to a common commercial product. Thus, different disciplines worked together but not in the same manner as traditional interdisciplinary projects. Additionally, while courses previously had projects, our novel Integrated Projects approach greatly enhance the connections between students in the same class and between students in different courses.

Results: Based on both formal and informally gathered student comments, their connections to the field of engineering has been remarkedly increasing because of the Integrated Projects.

Conclusions: Our Integrated Projects enabled students' teams from separate courses to work together yet with separate tools. Students examined different components of the same product, with each class analyzing their specific component with their course specific engineering principles.