Abstract:

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people, so they can tell us what to do.” Steve Jobs on Forbes. More than ever, society faces a panoply of complex challenges, from development of artificial intelligence, smart cities, health and well-being, and new energies that will improve the quality of life for the majority of the world population. These are complex issues demanding higher skills, “big ideas”, awe-inspiring solutions, from today’s top leaders.

At higher education there is a pool of young, creative, curious living human beings, the students, eager to make an impact in the world, to solve the problems of today’s and tomorrow’s society. However, to bridge the gap between knowledge and societal demands, these students are asked to apply interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary knowledge, beyond the one learned at one single subject.

In order to better prepare the Engineering Bachelor students for the emerging Innovation Driven spirit, this study presents an application of a novel teaching scheme at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto, in the academic year of 2018/2019, in a laboratory class, LSIS2, from the System’s Engineering Bachelor Degree. We apply a combination of the Challenged Based Learning (CBL) and of the Scrum framework from the Agile methodology, to boost the students’ participation in this innovation process. In this empirical study, students will be challenged to propose a new idea for a new product or service, develop a new conceptual model, evaluate the model using a series of surveys. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the methodologies implemented will be shown, as well as the benefits and difficulties felt by the students in their implementation.

Keywords:

Challenged Based Learning, Agile methodology, Innovation, Engineering.