Project-based learning (PBL) courses in higher education require the instructor team to be highly resourceful, multi-disciplined, and inspiring. It also needs student teams to be proactive, collaborative, and good at inquiries. Designing and implementing PBL in a classroom can be challenging due to teaching staff shortage and insufficient knowledge of instructors. To address these challenges, we proposed a novel PBL course design methodology to involve local enterprises and entrepreneurs as course co-instructors, thereby compensating for the lack of industry participation in the current PBL course development efforts. The methodology consists of five main pillars: (1) inquiry-based problem solving using practical real-world problems; (2) active knowledge construction through a multidisciplinary team; (3) situated learning through meaningful social interaction with a community of practice; (4) guided investigation with scaffolded instructions on research methodology and technology; and (5) prototype demonstration with expert feedback. To test the effectiveness of the PBL course design methodology, we performed two experiments at Southern University of Science and Technology, a top research university in Shenzhen, China, in a form of a three-week summer school. Two-year data was collected including archival course data, interview data of students, faculty and industry partners, as well as student feedback surveys. We found that the proposed PBL curriculum involving industry mentors can significantly improve students' engineering design skills and effectiveness of learning.
