Abstract:

Industrial companies increasingly realize that they cannot rely exclusively on their internal research and development activities for successful innovations. Targeted cooperation with universities enables them to obtain innovative and creative solutions to challenging industrial problems. Cooperations also deliver access to a pool of talents and skills, while overcoming their own operational blindness and also saving R&D costs in the long term.

However, these cooperations are not a one-way street. They are also welcome at universities, as they complement the mission of practice-oriented teaching and thus contribute to applied research and the transfer of knowledge to industry. For the students, cooperative learning provides contact to industry, which can be used on the one hand for topics of final theses and on the other hand as an introduction to potential employers.

For ten years now, so-called "idea competitions" have been conducted within a cooperation between Nuremberg Tech's Faculty of Computer Science and a locally-based, multinational conglomerate corporation. The idea competitions enable a didactic approach of project-based learning within a master-level course. From the beginning, the question was raised as to how the teaching-learning setting of the idea competition could be adapted to the needs and benefits of the partners involved. This setting was subject to a continuous improvement process. In addition, key success factors for the effective conduct of the course were derived.

In this article, a phase-based model of the underlying course concept is presented and explained in detail. During the preparation phase of the course, the lecturers and the cooperation partner focus on finding a current, innovative project topic that is realizable for students within a master-level course. The following phase, the initialization of the project, then involves the students. In addition to the coordination of administrative subjects, the focus is above all on conveying the project assignments and the required basic and contextual knowledge.

Furthermore, the student groups who compete with one another are composed. In the next phase, project work begins, with the generation of ideas by the groups. The lecturers limit themselves to a coaching role. Before transitioning to the following course phase, an additional contact with the cooperation partner takes place, with a discussion of the group exposés. During this step, the promising ideas worth pursuing are identified. These are then further developed in detail and solutions are worked out. This phase ends with the preparation of the project report, in combination with the final presentation of each group. In the final phase of the course, the first step is to critically evaluate the presentations of the groups by the lecturers. In these dry runs, the focus is on optimizing the logical sequence and the management suitability of the presentations. The highlight is then the closing event, at which the results achieved are presented and discussed in front of a jury consisting of representatives of the cooperation partner and the lecturers. The award ceremony and handing out of the certificates conclude the idea competition.

In this paper, the essential experiences encountered as well as the key success factors derived and the emerging benefits gained are discussed. Finally, the application of these experiences to the current idea competition in the summer semester of 2019 is presented.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, university-industry cooperation, computer science education, idea competition, teaching-learning setting.