ENHANCING STUDENTS’ COMPETENCIES BY INTEGRATING MULTIPLE COURSE-UNITS ON SEMESTER PROJECTS

Despite the important advances observed, nowadays, the Engineering programmes keep being challenged to better prepare their students to work on complex and multidisciplinary projects while demonstrating awareness of environmental and socio-economic issues and other soft skills as communication and teamwork. Recently, to meet these challenges, the ISEP’ Informatics Engineering programme (LEI) successfully adopted a project-based learning approach. In this approach, throughout the entire semester, students develop a real-world project that allows the application and assessment of the competencies taught by all course units of the semester in an integrated, multidisciplinary, and transversal way. In this paper, the authors (i) present this approach as well as the main challenges faced in implementing it; (ii) report the major findings and the perceived benefits and drawbacks; and (iii) discuss the ongoing adaptations and/or others seen as required to improve the approach and its results.