More than ten years ago, the Information and Communication Technology education units of Turku University of Applied Sciences, University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University aimed at facilitating their faculty to create and develop project-oriented learning activities. The result of this CDIO-inspired development was ICT Showroom, an annual exhibition and competition event open for all student projects of the campus. The concept of the exhibition and competition event as well as some early experiences were reported at the 5th Annual International CDIO Conference in Singapore 2009.
Since then, there has been a series of successful ICT Showrooms; the 10th anniversary event takes place in March 2017. The amount of student teams participating the event has grown steadily and the quality of the projects has been clearly improved since the first rounds. The early participants and competition winners have grown to experienced professionals many with entrepreneurial backgrounds. Yet much has changed during the years – both in the global and regional education arenas. Different forms of collaborative learning, university-industry activities and startup entrepreneurship facilitation are much more strongly present in higher education than when the first ICT Showroom posters were designed.
In this paper, we reflect the motivators behind the ICT Showroom collaboration and the development of the goals it aimed at over the years. Also the challenges and possible future directions of the joint venture are discussed. Is the ICT Showroom needed anymore? How does this discussion relate to the CDIO initiative and its future steps?
Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017