This paper presents the effort by the Course Management Team (CMT) of the Diploma in Chemical Engineering (DCHE) in Singapore Polytechnic (SP), to inculcate a sustainable thinking mind-set among its students. The aim is to achieve what the prominent British educator Stephen Sterling advocated as “sustainable education”. We share an emerging curriculum design model that we had developed, based on the worldwide CDIO (conceive, design, implement, operate) initiative (www.cdio.org). Essentially, our model uses CDIO as the foundation to design a curriculum where sustainable development concepts are integrated into selected core modules to support execution of sustainable development themed Year 3 Final Year Projects (FYPs). Several such examples are discussed in the paper. We also propose the use of design thinking and “appropriate technology” to complement the “Conceive and Design” stages; and the “Implement and Operate” stages of the FYP respectively. Thus, the paper discusses several FYP case studies to illustrate various works related to sustainable development while adopting the CDIO framework. Lastly, we share challenges we faced in our efforts and offer possible solutions.
Keywords: Sustainability, chemical engineering, CDIO, design thinking, Standards: 2, 4, 7
NOTE: Singapore Polytechnic uses the word "courses" to describe its education "programs". A "course" in the Diploma in Chemical Engineering consists of many subjects that are termed "modules"; which in the universities contexts are often called “courses”.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014