The School of Industrial Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ETSII-UPM) has been promoting student-centered teaching-learning activities, according to the aims of the Bologna Declaration, well before the official establishment of the European Area of Higher Education. In the last years we would like to highlight the Innova.Edu projects, funded by our centre during the academic years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006, which helped to promote several project-based learning activities in different subjects and to set common practices among our teaching staff for activities in the field of “conceive, design, implement, operate”.
Such student-centered teaching-learning experiences led us to the conviction that project-based learning is rewarding, both for students and academics, and should be additionally promoted in our new engineering programmes, adapted to the Grade + Master structure. The level of compromise of our teaching staff with these kind of activities is also noteworthy, as the teaching innovation experiences carried out in the last ten years have led to the foundation of 17 Teaching Innovation Groups in our centre, hence leading the ranking of teaching innovation among all UPM centres. Among interesting CDIO activities our students have taken part in specially complex projects, including the Formula Student, linked to the complete development of a competition car and the Cybertech competition, aimed at the design, construction and operation of robots for different purposes. Additional project-based learning teamwork activities have been linked to toy design experiences, to the development of medical devices, to the implementation of virtual laboratories, to the design of complete industrial installations and factories, among other interesting activities detailed in present review.
The implementation of Bologna process will culminate at ETSII-UPM with the beginning of the Master of Industrial Engineering program in the next academic year 2014-15, the program has been successfully approved by the Spanish Agency for Accreditation (ANECA), with the inclusion of a set of courses based upon the CDIO methodology denominated generally INGENIA, an acronym from the spanish verb "ingeniar" (to give ingenious solutions), also related etymologically in spanish with the word "ingeniero", engineer.
INGENIA students will experience the complete development process of a complex product or system and there will be different kind of projects covering most of the engineering majors at ETSII-UPM. Students will choose among the different INGENIA, depending on their personal interests.
INGENIA courses will be compulsory for all students enrolled in the first year of the Master Program at ETSII-UPM. The course is a 12 ECTS equivalent, which corresponds to a student workload between 300 to 360 hours, distributed along two semesters with the following structure: 120 hours of supervised work plus between 180 to 240 hours of personal student work, organised usually in teamworks. Professor supervised part of the courses will be divided into 30 hours dedicated to adapt basic theoretical knowledge derived from other courses to those directly related with the project, the second set of 60 hours will be devoted to practical work in the lab, with professor supervised sessions. Students also will receive two seminars of 15 hours each, one oriented to transversal outcomes, in particular, workshops on teamwork, communication skills and creativity techniques, and the other one about Social responsibility issues such as environmental impact, social, political, security, health, etc. The distribution of these lectures, practical sessions, seminars and workshops, will be shared among the 28 weeks on the two semesters of the first year, resulting in 4 hours per week of lectures or practical sessions in the regular schedule of students , the seminars and workshops will be programmed out from the regular schedule, but with full compatibility with the student schedule during both semesters.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014