Sustainable and accessible container house: developing soft skills in an interdisciplinary way

Abstract

Currently, sustainability is being widely evaluated as a way to ensure the development of society, meeting the needs of the current generation, without compromising the ability to meet the needs of future generations. Another very evident aspect is accessibility, which aims to implement measures to remove barriers, to promote broad and unrestricted access, with safety and autonomy, for people with disabilities or reduced mobility. Therefore, educational actions related to these aspects are valid, in the sense of making society aware of the importance of taking care of oneself, others and the environment that surrounds them. With the objective of contributing to the professional training of the Production Engineer, as well as to the construction of a more correct and fair society, in the themes of sustainability and accessibility, this paper aims to describe and discuss the results of the application of the Project Based Learning (PBL) approach in a Production Engineering course. For this, it was necessary to: carry out a bibliographic review of the content; collect data from projects developed by students; analyze the collected data; and present the results. The theme was the development of sustainable and affordable container house projects. In this sense, the teams worked to highlight the potential of this form of construction as a viable alternative to the conventional method, according to the specificity of each client, indicating its potential and limitations in the face of obtaining sustainable and accessible spaces. As a result, it was possible to verify the students' knowledge about the themes; the development of technical and transversal skills; in addition to consolidating PBL as the methodology adopted in the discipline. Finally, the project reached the proposed aim, thus contributing to the construction of an environmentally correct, economically viable and socially just society.