Abstract:

Designing means anticipating steps to move forward the quality of the everyday life in a worldwide planet with constrained assets. Gigantic challenges are emerging to adjust the well-being of mankind with the preservation of the already gained level of facilities.

European Project Semester (EPS) is an innovative educational programme offered by several European universities to students who have completed at least two years of study. Its objective is to create conventional and delicate abilities with a solid accentuation on multicultural cooperation and multidisciplinary ventures handling ethical and eco-friendly issues.

This paper describes how the European Project Semester (EPS), hosted by University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB), contributes to form and build undergraduate engineers, cognizant of their future and social impact, in this special and challenging period generated by the pandemic. The problem-solving action is based on intercultural communication and inventiveness, moral design and feasible thinking and worldwide relevant analysis. Specific learning approach cultivates the improvement of logical, specialized and interpersonal competencies, with an accentuation on moral and economical plan as prescribed by the university`s industrial partners and research institutes. During the course of 6 years, UPB has overseen 18 EPS projects, and analysed the evolution of 72 students from 12 different countries, organized in teams of 4 or 6 people.

The challenges of teacher-student interactions during this last semester, together with the detailed methodology used to keep the students engaged will be explained in detail in the present article, together with the results of the projects.

Keywords:

Engineering Education, European Project Semester, Design Thinking, Project-Based Learning.