The Student Design & Experiential Learning Center (SDELC) was established in 2000 to better support the various multi-disciplinary student design teams. In 2004, the Center's mission expanded 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 involving multi-disciplinary student research.

By 2006 the SDELC had expanded to ten student design teams. The center's expanded mission involved better funding and offering support and resources to multi-disciplinary project teams that had a research base to their activities. The SDELC provided academic credit opportunities in the form of three, one-hour classes on design, leadership and communication. The center also offers a half-credit course on experiential design through the Residential College (RC) program which has a per-semester enrollment of over 100 students engaged in hands-on learning projects. The SDELC's student design teams, research teams and projects, and academic courses are the foundation of experiential learning at Missouri S&T.