Project Description

DESTINE aims at fostering self-thinking in the 21st century innovators supported by a unique blend of educational methodologies tailored to societal and economic demands. Through the use of a complementary combination of design thinking, problem based learning and intercultural team working, the IP project will contribute to change the student philosophy of learning into active knowledge gaining and exploration. An additional project goal is to exchange the experience and good practices among teachers from partner universities as well as to educate teachers, and to develop and evaluate new methodologies for their further integration into engineering curricula. Direct beneficiaries of this IP include the first and second cycle students with general engineering, computing, and mechanics or applied IT background. The second target group is academics wishing to enhance their competencies in design thinking, problem based learning and other innovative teamwork methods and studentcentered learning. Also academic communities in other universities will benefit from the project outcomes through its published results. The program will be organized in three phases: online preparation, work at the venue, and follow-up activities. The first phase will consist of initial training of teachers and students and project-related research at home countries of team members.

Intensive work on the venue will consist of a blend of seminars on design thinking, soft skills and project-specific subjects coupled with teamwork on projects tackling different technical problems. Activities during the follow-up period will cover overall evaluation of the IP, dissemination of results, preparation of conference submissions. The first group of learning outcomes includes transversal skills, mainly related to design thinking. The other group is specific for each team project area. In other words, each student group project will be based on a project description template covering project details including generic and specific learning outcomes.

The expected outputs are twofold: student team project outcomes and IP overall project outcomes. Student team projects are expected to end up with a set of prototypes coupled with feasibility assessment on team project plans. Additionally, it is planned that students will propose papers devoted to their work during the project, to be submitted to student conferences. The other outputs of the IP will cover video materials, which can be used by people who participate in lifelong learning, commented lists of references, electronic toolkits and guidelines to be used as reference for curricula development, and a good practice guide for problem based learning based on the experience achieved along the intensive project.