What is the Student Design and Experiential Learning Center?

Formula Car's Newest Car at Competition

The Student Design & Experiential Learning Center (SDELC) was established in 2000 (as the UMR Student Design Competition Center) with the specific purpose of consolidating support and management of the multi-disciplinary, student design teams that existed independently at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri-Rolla). In 2004, a successful UM System Strategic Initiative proposal expanded the Center's mission to provide experiential learning in academic courses, identify and support student service learning projects within the curriculum, and support ad-hoc student teams in specialty academic events supporting multi-disciplinary student research.

Under the new mission the Center took steps to better fund our ten nationally competitive student design teams that involve over 400 students from all campus departments. We also began offering support and resources to special project teams that were multi-disciplinary in nature and had a research base to their activities. The SDELC began to offer academic credit opportunities in the form of three one-hour classes on design, leadership and communication. The Center also offers a half-credit course through the Residential College (RC) program on experiential design. The RC program currently has an enrollment of over 100 students (each semester) actively engaged in hands-on learning projects. In summary, the SDELC supports four major types of experiential learning today: 1) student design teams, 2) course implementation of experiential learning, 3) service learning and 4) multi-disciplinary design research projects.