A conceptual design process where decisions aim to minimize the economic, environmental, and social impact of the product lifecycle.
Published in Chapter:
Active Learning Strategies for Sustainable Engineering: The Case of the European Project Semester
Abel José Duarte (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal),
Benedita Malheiro (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal), Manuel Fernando Silva (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal), Paulo Duarte Ferreira (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal), and Pedro Barbosa Guedes (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal)
Copyright: © 2022
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-2309-7.ch008
Abstract
Engineering aims to improve the quality of daily life on a planet with limited resources. This chapter describes how the European Project Semester offered by the School of Engineering of the Porto Polytechnic contributes to make engineering undergraduates conscious of their environmental and societal impact. The program is a project-based active learning framework where problem-solving is supported by intercultural communication and creativity, ethical and sustainable reasoning, and global contextual analysis. This analysis shows that it fosters scientific, technical, and interpersonal competencies, emphasizing ethical and sustainable design as recommended by several reference institutions through the testimonials left on the project reports and the evolution perceived by the participants during the semester. These findings are supported by a sample of 45 projects conducted by 228 students from 23 countries and 65 degrees. All projects aimed to have a lasting impact on the future engineering practice of participants and, somehow, transform the world positively.