European Project Semester Research Articles

Why Students Choose the European Project Semester Program for Academic Mobility: A Case Study at an Engineering School

European Mobility Programmes promoted by the European Commission have propelled a significant change in students’ mobility across Europe in the last few decades. The European Project Semester (EPS) is one of those programmes. Research has mainly focused on understanding the factors that shape students’ decision to engage in mobility experiences but has not tackled the motivation(s) leading them to opt for that programme in a particular country at a specific institution. This paper aims to understand EPS students’ motivation to elect this programme for their mobility at a particular country/city/institution and hence contribute to help institutions define policies and practices to attract more students to this specific programme. Carried out at the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Porto, a mixed research methodology was followed, considering qualitative and quantitative data equally, and a theoretical framework was devised based on the push–pull factors model. Seventy-seven students participated in the study by filling in a closed-question questionnaire and engaging in focus group sessions. The findings sustained previous research and highlighted that students’ motivation is supported by a combination of factors (personal, professional, academic), among which the personal category was the highest rated. These results show that the motivations for choosing the EPS programme do not differ considerably from those leading students to undertake regular mobility.

Learning by doing using the Life Cycle Assessment tool: LCA projects in collaboration with industries

Active learning, also called "learning by doing" (LbD), has resulted in positive learning outcomes in several higher education degrees. This paper describes an LbD experience within Chemical Engineering education aiming to enhance learning and transferable competencies using a Life Cycle Assessment course as a vehicle. This compulsory course belongs to the European Project Semester (EPS) program taught in the fourth year of the Chemical Engineering Degree at the University of Cantabria. From the beginning, the activity has targeted LCA practice with a strong emphasis on performance and its application as a decision-making tool in real case studies through close collaboration with regional companies. Working in partnership with industrial companies has favoured a win-win-win situation as students could apply knowledge as future LCA specialists. In contrast, companies gained valuable insights to improve their environmental performance, and lecturers enhanced their industrial networks. A public session carried out at the end of the activity created an enriching debate on subjects from a diversity of points of view (e.g., the selection of impact categories, the proposed improvements for environmental impact reduction, etc.). According to the lecturers, the competencies acquired by students through this LbD experience in life cycle assessment have notably evolved, demonstrating not only an enhanced understanding of environmental impacts across a product life cycle but also a significant improvement in critical thinking, team collaboration, and practical problem-solving skills, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and its application in real-world scenarios. This is in line with the student’s perception that considered, such as "problem resolution", "capacity for analysing" and synthesis and "capacity for information" management. These are essential not only for future LCA practitioners but for chemical engineers.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT APPLIED FOR COMPOSITE MATERIALS USED IN AERONAUTICS. CARBON FIBER AND NANO-ADDITIVES

This paper presents the results of theoretical and applied research related to composite materials, carbon fiber and nano-additives. The objective of this work is to investigate the properties and behavior of custom designed composite materials which are intended for applications in aerospace engineering. The holistic approach is expressed by the structure of this research project which consists of the technical part and the economic part, that is analyzed in terms of project management. The specificity of the work is given by the requirements of the European Project Semester EPS, where international teams of students actively experience a multidisciplinary and multicultural project for one semester in another university, which has developed research and industrial partnerships. For developing such project, the approach provided by INCAS as Research Partner is oriented towards Problem Based Learning and Project Organized Learning. The University as Organizer provides Project Related Courses and some complementary Project Organized Learning. The research was oriented towards the customized design and analyzing of composite materials samples for potential use in aerospace engineering, the development and validation of materials and methodologies. The benefits of the research project are related to the applications of composite materials and in the subsidiary to allow the students learn valuable professional lessons and experience from this research project.

ISSUES ON QUADCOPTER DESIGN CUSTOMIZED FOR URBAN AERIAL SURVEILLANCE

The topic of this paper is in line with the efforts to reduce the spread of the pandemic effects; the objective is to design a quadcopter meant to perform urban aerial surveillance, focused on monitoring the urban traffic of cars and monitoring the traffic of groups of people, who should not gather in groups larger than three persons. The specificity of the work is given by the requirements of the European Project Semester EPS, where international teams of students actively experience a multidisciplinary and multicultural project for one semester in another university. This opportunity has allowed them to develop research and industrial partnerships. To this purpose, the approach provided by the I.N.C.A.S. as Research Partner is oriented towards Problem Based Learning and Project Organized Learning. The University as Organizer provides Project Related Courses and complementary Project Organized Learning. The research was oriented towards the customized design of a drone able to efficiently achieve the objective. The benefits of the research project are related mainly to the potential applications of the drone, with a good effect to cost ratio and to allowing the students to subsequently acquire valuable professional knowledge and experience from this research project

European Project Semester – The Model of International Interdisciplinary Electronics Education

Wydawnictwo SIGMA-NOT wydaje czasopisma fachowe informujące swoich czytelników o najnowszych osiągnięciach naukowych i nowoczesnych rozwiązaniach technicznych w Polsce i na świecie, popularyzuje problemy techniczne oraz poszerza wiedzę i kulturę techniczną.

Learning Engineering with EPS@ISEP: Developing Projects for Smart Sustainable Cities

This paper presents an overview on how the European Project Semester capstone programme offered by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (EPS@ISEP) fosters learning by challenging engineering, business and product development undergraduates to address sustainability issues afflicting cities and communities nowadays. This will be done by analysing the reports and the learning journey of three multicultural and multidisciplinary EPS@ISEP teams during the design, development and test of a smart billboard, a self-oriented solar mirror and a level monitoring system for waste oil bins. These three projects were conducted within EPS@ISEP, a project-based learning framework dedicated to the development of key engineering skills, namely multidisciplinary teamwork, inter-cultural communication, ethical and sustainability-oriented problem-solving. The involved students contributed, not only, to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, one of UNESCO’s sustainable development goals, but learnt and practiced together sustainability-driven design, while searching for an innovative solution for a smart city problem. This conclusion is supported by the analysis of the content the three project reports.

Engineering Education for Sustainable Development: The European Project Semester Approach

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution:</i> An analysis of the extent to which sustainability is present in the syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and student final reports of the three Iberian European project semester (EPS) providers, over a five-year period. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</i> EPS is a one-semester capstone project framework that adopts project-based learning and multicultural, multidisciplinary teamwork. Educating engineers for sustainable development requires fostering critical and ethical thinking and a desire for equity, solidarity and preservation of natural resources, and cultural and genetic diversity. Existing engineering capstone design programs emphasize solving real world problems, hands-on training, and soft skills, but few focus on sustainability aspects of engineering design. The three Iberian EPS providers adopt project-based learning and teamwork methodologies, promoting the development of transversal skills and addressing sustainability in a multicultural and multidisciplinary background. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Intended Outcomes:</i> To show that the three Iberian EPS providers follow these recommendations and contribute to raising students’ awareness of sustainable development. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Application Design:</i> The proposed sustainability learning assessment method collects evidence from syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and final reports to extract faculty and student perspectives. The sustainability-related terms collected were processed into word cloud format, allowing a simple and intuitive interpretation of students’ understanding of sustainability, and in co-occurrence network format, to understand if sustainability has a pervasive or confined presence within the reports. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Findings:</i> Iberian EPS faculty and students are aware of the social, economic, and environmental impact of their projects, in terms of quality of life, social responsibility, the use of resources, and environmentally friendly technology.

Fostering Professional Competencies in Engineering Undergraduates with EPS@ISEP

Engineering education addresses the development of professional competencies in undergraduates. In this context, the core set of professional competencies includes critical thinking and problem solving, effective communication, collaboration and team building, and creativity and innovation—also known as the four Cs—as well as socio-professional ethics and sustainable development—referred in this paper as the two Ss. While the four Cs were identified by the associates of the American Management Association based on the needs of the society, professional associations, and businesses; this paper proposes the two S extension to ensure that future engineers contribute to the well-being of individuals and the preservation of life on Earth. It proposes a tangible framework—the 4C2S—and an application method to analyse the contributions made by engineering capstone programmes to the development of these core competencies in future engineering professionals. The method is applied to an engineering capstone programme—the European Project Semester (EPS) offered by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP)—and a specific project case—EPS@ISEP Pet Tracker project developed in 2013, constituting, in addition, a road map for the application of the 4C2S framework to engineering capstone programmes. The results show that EPS@ISEP complies with the 4C2S framework.

Collaborative Learning with Sustainability-driven Projects: A Summary of the EPS@ISEP Programme

This paper describes the collaborative learning environment, aligned with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, provided by the European Project Semester (EPS). EPS is a one semester capstone project programme offered by eighteen European engineering schools as part of their student ex-change programme portfolio. In this international programme, students are organized in teams, grouping individuals from diverse academic backgrounds and nationalities. The teams, after choosing a project proposal, become fully responsible for the conduction of their projects. By default, project proposals refer to open multidisciplinary real problems. The purpose of the project is to expose students to problems of a greater dimension and complexity than those faced throughout the degree programme as well as to put them in con-tact with the so-called real world, in opposition to the academic world. EPS provides an integrated framework for undertaking capstone projects, which is focused on multicultural and multidisciplinary teamwork, communication, problem-solving, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurship, ethical reasoning and global contextual analysis. Specifically, the design and development of sustainable systems for growing food allow students not only to reach the described objectives, but to foster sustainable development practices. As a re-sult, we recommend the adoption of this category of projects within EPS for the benefit of engineering students and of the society as a whole.

Chemical Engineering European Project Semester: an international proposal for teaching Chemical Engineering

Spanish university students are aware of the need of introducing an international dimension in their curricula. A new alternative to the ERASMUS + program that can be named internationalization at home has been created at the University of Cantabria. The Chemical Engineering degree offers the Chemical Engineering European Project Semester (CE-EPS) program. It consists of three subjects plus a team work that will end with the Final Project. All these activities will be developed in English. The program has been implanted for the first time during the academic year 2013-2014 with the participation of 8 Spanish students and 2 foreigners. All participants have successfully completed their studies.

The European Project Semester at ISEP: the challenge of educating global engineers

Current engineering education challenges require approaches that promote scientific, technical, design and complementary skills while fostering autonomy, innovation and responsibility. The European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) (EPS@ISEP) is a one semester project-based learning programme (30 European Credit Transfer Units (ECTU)) for engineering students from diverse scientific backgrounds and nationalities that intends to address these goals. The students, organised in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, are challenged to solve real multidisciplinary problems during one semester. The EPS package, although on project development (20 ECTU), includes a series of complementary seminars aimed at fostering soft, project-related and engineering transversal skills (10 ECTU). Hence, the students enrolled in this programme improve their transversal skills and learn, together and with the team of supervisors, subjects distinct from their core training. This paper presents the structure, implementation and results of the EPS@ISEP that was created in 2011 to apply the best engineering practices and promote internationalisation and engineering education innovation at ISEP.

Practical Elements in Danish Engineering Programmes, Including the European Project Semester

In Denmark, all engineering programmes in HE have practical elements; for instance, at Bachelor's level, an internship is an integrated part of the programme. Furthermore, Denmark has a long-established tradition of problem-based and project-organized learning, and a large part of students' projects, including their final projects, is done in cooperation with industry. This interaction with industry is important because students learn about the culture of the companies with which they are involved and they usually find it very motivating to discover that the companies can benefit from their work. Given the difference between theoretical teaching at a university and practical work done in a company, internships help students to combine practice and theory. Many large projects involve teams and this offers students good learning opportunities and enables them to improve their interpersonal skills. In addition, students learn to learn, an increasingly important requirement since knowledge can rapidly become outdated. Engineers must now be able to work in an international context and to address this need a ‘European Project Semester’ (EPS) was introduced in 1995. EPS is based on experience from problem-based learning in an international context, with exchange students working in international teams. The focus is on international teamwork and intercultural communication and students not only acquire technical skills but also improve their communication skills and their international competences.

Project Based Learning in International Teams – Monitoring the Effectiveness of Teamwork

Students working on semester-long projects in international teams, such as the European Project Semester programme at the Ingeniørhøjskolen i København – University College (IHK), face many challenges, not the least of which is communication between different cultures. The supervisor pays a key role in supporting a project team and monitoring its effectiveness. One of the key tools employed is a self and peer review assessment, undertaken twice by each team member during the semester. The assessment considers the quantity and quality of the contribution made by each team member and their participation in teamworking activities. The supervisor uses the assessment to monitor teamworking and to give constructive feedback and advice where needed. Comparison of the responses from self and peer review assessments was undertaken and the findings are presented. Limited results over a 3 year period were analysed and compared with Autumn 2009 semester results and conclusions drawn.

Remote Laboratory Architecture for the Validation of Industrial Control Applications

The seven engineering degrees of the Higher Technical School of Design Engineering (ETSID), Technical University of Valencia, include in their formation programs, subjects, and laboratory projects to instruct students in the aspects of the design, development, and validation of applications for process control, automation, industrial informatics, and embedded systems. Moreover, the authors participate in European projects of education such as the International Network of Embedded System (INES) and the European Project Semester (EPS), where exchange students remotely perform the first phase of their projects at ETSID from their home universities. To significantly reduce the cost of installing a huge number of real prototypes in labs and to fulfill the distance requirements of the exchange students, a remote laboratory architecture, i.e., simPROCes, has been designed. simPROCes not only permits the teleoperation of simulators/real prototypes but also allows that complete control applications be remotely tested and validated. simPROCes is precisely specified to be independent of the model of computer, data acquisition card, programming language, and operating system, and is transparent to the programmer and easy to use. This system is useful both for the education and development of control application purposes. A water tank process shows the installation procedure of simPROCes to test and validate control applications. The experience of applying simPROCes in the electronic engineering degree and within the framework of INES and EPS has been successfully rated by student surveys.