Abstract:

How can you teach future engineers to think globally and act locally to solve a specific problem? The European GLOCAL project (2019-1-PL01-KA203-065654) was designed as a research on innovative methodologies to design and implement the academic training required to do so, both of university students and their teachers, with the economic support of an “Erasmus + KA203 - Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education”. An introductory approach to the “GLOCAL-Innovation future engineers' training for contemporary city's problems”, as well as of its preliminary results was already submitted to the evaluation of academics in ICERI 2020 [1]. This paper will present more recent results of the same project, explaining the difficulties faced to achieve the expected outcomes related to the first part of the planned Summer Schools in Bialystok (Poland) and Klaipeda (Lithuania), two weeks of intensive but rewarding work, shared two times by 24 students and their teachers.

In the planning of the project, those activities were expected to be done in the summer of year 2020 and of the year 2021. But the organizers, authors of this paper, had to face two main threats to be able to do so: the world wide Covid-19 pandemic that reached Europe in March 2020 and the invasion of Ucraine by Russia started in February 2022.

For the First part of the GLOCAL 1 Summer School at Bialystok University of Technology, in Poland, the programmed activities considered the mobility both of students and teaching staff from the other 2 partner universities, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), from Spain, and Klaipedos Valstybine Kolegija / Klaipeda State University of Applied Sciences (KVK), from Lithuania. The activity was held finally, from 4 to 14th April 2022 (11 days), by 8 students from each of the 3 partner universities, 4 incoming teachers from each Spanish and Lithuanian partners and 14 Polish lecturers, both from academia and from participating companies or local administrations.

The First part of the the GLOCAL 2 Summer School at Klaipeda in Lithuania, organized by Klaipedos Valstybine Kolegija (Klaipeda State University of Applied Sciences - KVK), was organized under similar conditions, with 8 students from each of the 3 partner universities, 3 incoming teachers from Spain and 5 Polish teachers, as well as Lithuanian lecturers. The activity was held from 20 to 30th June 2022 (11 days).

The experiences and results of this First Part of GLOCAL 1 and GLOCAL 2 will be detailed in this paper, as well as the methodologies developed to establish the level of achievement developed by the students’ teams, divided in groups of 3 members one of each country and with different type of studies. But it will be also explained, with preliminary conclusions related to those results and methodologies, that the parkour of those students and their teachers is much longer: after that first part of their Summer School, a second part will be in Blended form. It includes an e-learning part, as well as a face-to-face part realised in a different country. This last part, also two weeks long, will be held in the city of Madrid, in Spain, in September 2022.

References:
[1] D. Gawryluk, M.A. Flórez de la Colina, D. Krawczyk, P.C. Izquierdo Gracia, D. Jankauskienė, E. Brezgyté (2020) Understanding the problems of teaching future engineers to think globally and act locally: Glocal Project, ICERI2020 Proceedings, pp. 7249-7257.

Keywords:

Collaborative and Problem-based Learning, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.