Principles and results of ten years of operation of a research/education laboratory of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Intel Corporation (MIPT-Intel lab) in context of conforming to CDIO standards are described. Since its inception in 2003, the laboratory’s mission was in upbringing software engineers from undergraduate students of Department of Radio Engineering and Cybernetics. To achieve this, acting software engineers from Intel lead educational research projects. These projects topics stemmed from real academia and industry problems, including such areas of software and services, as compilers, simulators, microprocessor design etc. Later, students that showed outstanding results were invited for internship that allowed them to write their bachelor thesis as a part of a real world project at Intel, being a part of large software engineering teams. In April of 2013, MIPT joined CDIO initiative. Therefore, an assessment of existing approach was required to make sure that our educational, engineering and research principles meet new standards and curriculum. In this paper we first describe our original philosophy and methods of operation. Then we proceed to outline transformations undertaken in order to meet new requirements. We argue that while MIPT-Intel lab met certain CDIO principles from its beginning of operation, there is still a lot of work that has to be done. A number of changes are needed not inside the laboratory itself, but on the department level.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014