Abstract
<p>In addition to the engineering knowledge base that has been traditionally taught, today’s undergraduate engineering students need to be given the opportunity to practice a set of skills that will be demanded to them by future employers, namely: creativity, teamwork, problem solving, leadership and the ability to generate innovative ideas. In order to achieve this and educate engineers with both in-depth technical knowledge and professional skills, universities must carry out their own innovating and find suitable approaches that serve their students. This article presents a novel approach that involves university-industry collaboration. It is based on creating a student community for a particular company, allowing students to deal with real industry projects and apply what they are learning in the classroom. A sample project for the German sports brand adidas is presented, along with the project results and evaluation by students and teachers. The university-industry collaborative approach is shown to be beneficial for both students and industry.</p>
Highlights
New generations of students are becoming more and more demanding
This article presents a new educational approach focused on fostering creativity, as well as other aptitudes demanded by industrial companies such as teamwork, problem solving, leadership and the capacity to generate innovative ideas
The approach consists in creating a student community for university-industry collaboration that benefits both the company and the students’ education
Summary
New generations of students are becoming more and more demanding. There is a widely known rule of thumb (Johnstone et al, 1976) that states that students stop paying attention between 10 and 20 minutes into a lecture; this loss of attention leads to boredom and lack of motivation and engagement. The problems solved in university are normally rigid, having only one possible solution and one correct way of attaining it Sir Ken Robinson stated that “creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” (Robinson, 2009). This means that creativity is an essential aptitude for real work −after all, the problems faced by industry do not have just one way of being tackled− but it is necessary for fostering students’ motivation and enthusiasm.
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