Learning Engineering Through Teams

Abstract

Certainly apprehensive with how things go in academia concerning engineering project education we observed and analysed different learning settings, either in engineering schools and companies, by discussing with different actors (academic community, teachers, pedagogical and scientific board elements, students). We exercised some alternative approaches to distinct learning paradigms, and we concluded for simple general recommendations that can be placed in practice in academia and companies, in engineering project contexts. The goal of our research is to make explicit a specific paradigm, an integrated way of looking into engineering practice and engineering learning, mainly in engineering projects context. Internalizing lessons from this alternative paradigm we deploy a way of doing in class that can be explored as active learning and project-based learning. The main advantage of our proposed approach is that learning occurs by doing and, we would say more importantly, learning occurs almost as a sub-product of doing. And in fact there are mix goals in our approach. One is performing, and obtaining results in engineering project design and development, the second one is a by-product and it is learning, enriching its own dynamic capabilities, and internalizing tacit and explicit knowledge about the work experienced. Of course the effectiveness of this model resides in the alignment of the two goals, which implies mature stuff and mature students almost about taking their master degree.