Abstract
This paper summarises the joint efforts of a multinational group of six undergraduate students cooperating within the European Project Semester (EPS) conducted at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP). The EPS@ISEP initiative, made available as a part of the Erasmus+ international students exchange programme, employs the principles of problem-based learning, facing students with—albeit downscaled—real-life scenarios and tasks they may encounter in their future professional practice. Participation in the project initiative outclasses most of the traditional courses through a wide spawn of its learning outcomes. Participants acquire not only hard skills necessary for an appropriate execution of the project, but also broaden their understanding of the approached problem through detailed scientific, management, marketing, sustainability, and ethics analysis—all in the atmosphere of multicultural and interdisciplinary collaboration. The team under consideration, based on personal preferences and predispositions, chose the topic of vertical farming and, in particular, to design a domestic indoor gardening solution, appropriate for space efficient incubation of plants. The paper portrays the process, from research, analysis, formulation of the idea to the design, development and testing of a minimum viable proof of concept prototype of the “Vereatable” solution.
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References
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Funding
This work was partially financed by the ERDF—European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation—COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the FCT—Fundação para a Ciância e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013.
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Sevastiadou, A. et al. (2019). Vertical Farming—An EPS@ISEP 2018 Project. In: Auer, M., Tsiatsos, T. (eds) The Challenges of the Digital Transformation in Education. ICL 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11935-5_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11935-5_41
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