FOSTERING LEARNING AND STUDENT INTERACTIVITY IN REAL WORLD ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

The careers engineering students are going to pursue in the labour market require the knowledge of technical and non-technical (soft) skills, team-work, and collaborative and communication skills among others. This paper describes some key aspects of the design, implementation and evaluation of three course projects, targeting real world applications, carried out in an MSc Engineering degree. Assessment is both formative and summative and makes use of mid-term check points, of rubrics and of peer review. Overall, and although these course projects have proved to be powerful learning approaches and tools, which enhance students' motivation, engagement, skills development and learning, there is a need to get students involved in these less traditional ways of learning and evaluation at an early stage.