CDIO means bringing the engineer's daily live and working practice into the educational system. In our opinion this is best done by selecting an appropriate project from industry.
In this paper we describe how we have mapped an industrial IT project to a 2nd semester design-build project in the Diploma IT program at the Technical University of Denmark.
The system in question is a weighing system operating in a LAN environment. The system is used in the medical industry for producing tablets. We present the design of a curriculum to support the development of major components of the weighing system. A simple teaching model for software engineering is presented which combines technical disciplines with disciplines from section 2-4 in the CDIO syllabus. The implementation of a joint project involving several courses supports the CDIO perspective. Already the traditional IT-diploma education for decades has included many of the essential features of the CDIO (for example, focus on teamwork, development of social skills, the open nature of design problems).
The specific project has previously been conducted on 5th Semester. The project has now been brought forward to the 2nd semester of study. A successful implementation at this level requires careful planning of activities through the semester. Principles of the CDIO have been of great help in this regard. Finally we draw conclusions and give our recommendations based on those.