Louisiana Tech’s first-year engineering program has blown the top off the hands-on barrier, providing relevant, project-focused education for over 400 students each year. Our six semester hour course sequence, called “Living with the Lab”, boosts experiential learning through student ownership of inexpensive laboratory equipment. Each student purchases a robotics kit along with a collection of tools, software and supplies to provide a platform for laboratory and design projects. Student ownership of the “lab” expands the scope and complexity of projects that can be undertaken with large groups and provides a mechanism for building the knowledge, skills and spirit that lead to innovation. Students completing our first-year experience report a 550% increase in hands-on relative to our previous “hands-on” curriculum, which also culminated in a design/build/test project. While expansion of the curriculum to all engineering students at Louisiana Tech was made possible by an NSF CCLI grant, the effort continues and is sustainable in terms of resources and faculty workload.