Choose Your Own Adventure: empowering students to combine structured and open Challenge-Based Learning

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is being increasingly adopted in engineering education, including in mandatory courses. Recently, authors have described a tension between structured and open approaches to CBL, with significant pedagogical trade-offs in both cases. This Work-In-Progress Innovative Practice article proposes “Choose Your Own Adventure in Challenge-Based Learning” (CYOA-CBL), a model which reconfigures the open/structured CBL duality as a spectrum, and empowers students to fine-tune their learning by making their course more structured or open. Through CYOA-CBL, we hope to give our contribution to making CBL more replicable and better aligned with diverse student motivations.