Abstract:

The new university context is demanding new capabilities to our students. In this work we will focus our attention in three of them. Firstly, besides the technical competences related to their specific degree, student must demonstrate generic skills such as team working, communication or problem solving. In this work we will highlight those related to project development. Second, students must be able to cooperate with other technicians who belong to different areas. Real engineering projects are usually multidisciplinary in order to provide complete solutions to global problems. Finally, in the current times, social and environmental awareness has become more relevant. Engineering has to participate in the solutions for the main social problems, and engineering students should also realize this responsibility.

This work is aimed at developing a teaching experience to foster these three capabilities in our students. To achieve this, we organize a multidisciplinary project in which students from two different degrees cooperate in order to achieve a common goal. This project means a challenge for them and will produce a real final product. The project follows the Learning-Service methodology, so that students perform a relevant service to society. We pay attention to the process followed in the design of the project resolution, in particular the support required by the students. So we help them to acquire the skills needed to face the project by using Project Based Learning (PBL) principles and some learning theories.

In this first experience, we define a project about energy efficiency. The challenge consists in monitoring the efficiency of a building regarding the energy consumption. Moreover, the study will suggest infrastructure changes and consumption habits. To develop this work, students from Computes Science and Architecture will have to work together. Students from Computer Science develop the needed infrastructure of wireless sensor network, processor node, communication and data storage. Students from Architecture develop the building theoretical model, data analysis and auditory. During the years 2018 and 2019 five students have been involved in this experience. Although this first experience has been applied to the development of Final Degree Projects, we are developing a framework that will allow to apply future experiences to degree courses.

In this paper we describe the steps we have followed to design the framework, the definition of the Learning-Service project, the PBL principles and learning theories used, the work developed by students as well as the results obtained.

Keywords:

Learning-Service, Capabilities, Multidisciplinary, Energy Efficiency.