Among the many interesting facts we know about how experiences affect learning, one relates especially to CDIO: Engineering students tend to learn by experiencing the concrete and then applying that experience to the abstract.
Unlike their counterparts of yesteryear, many engineering students these days don’t arrive at college armed with hands-on experiences like tinkering with cars or building radios.
A basic CDIO premise is that hands-on experience is a vital foundation on which to base theory and science. To address this, CDIO programs seek to improve the way engineering is taught and learned in four significant ways:
- They increase active and hands-on learning;
- They emphasize problem formulation and solution;
- They thoroughly explore the underlying concepts of the tools and techniques of engineering; and
- They institute innovative and exciting ways of gathering feedback.