The relevance of the new Brazilian Curriculum Guidelines (new NCGs) for engineering undergraduate courses coincides with the expectations of the academic community, companies employing this qualified workforce and the need to update education in the country, aiming to meet future demands for more and better engineers. In this sense, given the transformations that are taking place in the world of production and work, the new NCGs can stimulate the modernization of engineering courses, through continuous updating, centering on the student as an agent of knowledge, greater integration school-enterprise, the appreciation of inter and transdisciplinarity, as well as the important role of the teacher as an agent for conducting the necessary changes, inside and outside the classroom. However, engineering undergraduate courses find it difficult to adapt to the new NCGs, as they have had teaching practices based on lectures for many years, where the teacher transfers knowledge and the most important intellectual skill of the good student is the memorization of academic content and its repetition in tests. The purpose of this article is to present the implementation of the new NCGs through the CDIO approach. This implementation represents a change in the teaching and learning process, maintaining the excellence of the academic content, reorganizing the pedagogical project of the course, integrating new academic practices, and adding skills and competences necessary for the modern engineer. The implementation is shown through a case study involving the Mechanical Engineering undergraduate course at the Military Institute of Engineering and the initial results demonstrate an increase in student’s motivation, innovation and problem solving in new academic activities of practical and active learning. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the CDIO approach is a methodology aligned with the proposals of the new NCGs for engineering courses and aims to motivate other Brazilian universities to use CDIO.
