Innovations & Creativity in Engineering Education

Globalization creates a climate to speed up progress and rapid change, but also gives rise to new problems. In this context, society needs responsible leaders, with societal conscience and concerns, with skills to learn and to adapt to rapid change all long their life and entrepreneurship. CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) is a framework for engineering education based on outcomes, rather than on contents, that has been adopted by a growing number of engineering educational institutions to educate the next generation of engineering leaders. In order to support engineering students to become entrepreneurs and to bear other concerns than merely technical on today?s rapid changing world, the authors believe the CDIO syllabus needs to be improved and, therefore, propose a pre requisite to a useful CDIO perspective: IdEF, standing for Identify, Evaluate and Formulate real problems and needs. Hence, a new pedagogy is necessary. This has to be based on methods to improve deeper and broader scientific learning and, simultaneously, to develop students? curiosity, realism, creativity and also team work, leadership and entrepreneurship skills. Students? led projects are an important tool in this sense, as the experience carried out at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto in the last three years has shown. As a consequence, the University of Porto is now promoting its generalisation to all the faculties of the university.Abstract: Globalization creates a climate to speed up progress and rapid change, but also gives rise to new problems. In this context, society needs responsible leaders, with societal conscience and concerns, with skills to learn and to adapt to rapid change all long their life and entrepreneurship. CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) is a framework for engineering education based on outcomes, rather than on contents, that has been adopted by a growing number of engineering educational institutions to educate the next generation of engineering leaders. In order to support engineering students to become entrepreneurs and to bear other concerns than merely technical on today?s rapid changing world, the authors believe the CDIO syllabus needs to be improved and, therefore, propose a pre requisite to a useful CDIO perspective: IdEF, standing for Identify, Evaluate and Formulate real problems and needs. Hence, a new pedagogy is necessary. This has to be based on methods to improve deeper and broader scientific learning and, simultaneously, to develop students? curiosity, realism, creativity and also team work, leadership and entrepreneurship skills. Students? led projects are an important tool in this sense, as the experience carried out at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto in the last three years has shown. As a consequence, the University of Porto is now promoting its generalisation to all the faculties of the university.