Abstract:

Smart textiles have been attracting an increasing interest of the industry in recent years. Nevertheless, the topic is still incipient and due to the newest topic, the presence of it in the educational curricula is scarce and mainly devoted to master's degrees. HACKTEX project, an Erasmus+ project funded by the European Union, aimed to develop open-access resources to complement the knowledge of European engineering students’ curricula in the field of smart textiles through different pedagogical tools. In that sense, in the framework of the project, a virtual training based on MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), has been developed.

This MOOC is divided into 5 lessons:
(1) Introduction to Smart Textiles;
(2) Raw materials and products for functional and smart textiles;
(3) Technologies for functional and smart textiles;
(4) Standards and characterization of functional and smart textiles; and
(5) Issues related to the sustainability of functional and smart textiles.

To test the produced MOOC, a Bootcamp training was carried out at the University of Borås (Sweeden) with students from the hosting university, from TUIASI (Romania), from University of West Attica (Greece) and from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain). Previously to its start, the students accessed to the online virtual training and studied the materials available. Then, during the Bootcamp, the project partners designed as trainers tested the knowledge acquired by the students from the MOOC with different learning methodologies. The TECTEX Research group from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, was responsible for the first day of the Bootcamp where, a Workshop about raw materials and products for functional and smart textiles (corresponding to lesson 2 of the virtual materials) was performed. The Workshop started checking the knowledge of the students about the raw materials presented on the MOOC with an interactive quiz. Then, the students were grouped to experiment with different smart materials from the MOOC to check the properties. After a lunch break, the groups (composed of at least one member from each institution) were asked to develop a product concept based on, at least, one of the raw materials studied. The experience was successful, with five different products conceptualized and presented at the end of the afternoon season. The students, through an anonymous questionnaire, evaluated the workshop and the results were positive, considering the experience useful, since the activity allowed them both, deepening on the topic studied and networking with other engineering students from different universities and backgrounds.

Keywords:

Textiles, Smart textiles, Workshop, MOOC.