The audience was composed of experts and students in engineering and education.

Visiting Portugal’s University of Aveiro some weeks ago provided me opportunities to speak with doctoral students and professors of engineering and education.

After I delivered a formal presentation to a small but enthusiastic group at the University of Aveiro’s Department of Education, my host, José Manuel Nunes de Oliveira drove me to the University’s satellite campus, known as the Polytechnic School of Águeda (or Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Universidade de Aveiro) where he teaches engineering.

Jose and his colleagues use Problem-Based Learning to teach engineering students.  They have formatted their classrooms to support group-based learning.  (My DIT colleague, Gavin Duffy, visited Jose and his campus earlier in the year to see how they use space. He wanted their advice to help in the programming phase of DIT’s new engineering facilities.)

What impressed me most in touring the buildings and grounds of the Águeda campus, though, was that the students were all working in groups–and that they seemed to be doing so on every type of project.

Jose says that after the teachers introduce the group-learning approach in the first year, students embrace it and want to do everything this way.

I thought that Jose said that students receive credit for their topic courses (i.e.,those with specific engineering content), but not for their project work (I was wrong, as I explain in my subsequent blog). In architecture we refer to these technical/topic classes as “support courses.”

All the courses a students take in a semester at the Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda help support the project they have been asked to do in groups. They are able to apply what they learn in the projects they design… but they don’t get formal credit for the design activities. In architecture in the USA, the design activities are assigned the most credit (typically 5-6 credit hours per semester) while each support course is generally worth just 3 credits. The architecture community tends to value the project or “design studio” work above all else.

Engineering students working together

Jose showed me around the various classroom and group-work spaces.

Students and teachers…

…can check out keys fro each space.

Student discussion

Example equipment

Lab

Lab

Materials storage

Group-learning lab

Group-learning lab

Most equipment they have is actual scale (i.e., the real thing) but this one is a model.

Students working together

Students working together

Students working together

Students (and teacher) working together

Group-learning lab

Past projects made by students…

…usually in groups.

Another past project

Another past project

Even the business students on this campus work in teams.

Here, students work in the cafeteria.

Robots available for use in the machine shop/testing lab.

Past projects stored in the in the machine shop/testing lab.

Past projects

Past projects

Equipment in the in the machine shop/testing lab.

This so reminds me of my days in architecture school…

…I learned to use all this equipment…

…and I machined parts of an airplane I was building with my dad.

I loved working in the wood and metal machine shops.

A project under development

A project under development

Faculty offices — they clearly work together, too, based on the arrangement of desks!