ENGINEERING EDUCATION

The topic of Engineering Education covers from multiple perspectives the study of conditions, developments, approaches, methods and experiences relevant to the education of engineers. In addition to academics, those interested in this topic are company trainers and industrial leaders.

In this field, scholars attempt to provide answers to the following questions:

• What do engineering knowledge, skills and abilities consist of? When do they become knowledge?
• What are the learning mechanisms that engineers exhibit?
• What are the educational systems and institutional practices of engineering education?
• How does human diversity and its inclusion contribute to engineering processes and products?
• What is the status of the development and use of assessment methods, tools and metrics?

As with the basic engineering subjects, the educational aspects that are of scientific interest concern the teaching activities of the early years in which there are large classes of beginner students to whom the fundamentals of Design Methods for Industrial Engineering are to be passed on. These contents will be, for the entire career of future engineers, both a working tool with which to elaborate the development of technical solutions or industrial products and a communication language through which to transmit information on product geometries and the uncertainty allowed for them so that the functionalities envisaged by the designer are achieved. It is a language that has the same characteristics, as a working and communication tool, as other written languages and like them presents a high rate of evolution that must be kept up with in order not to lose opportunities for dialogue and competitiveness in industrial contexts.

Over the past fifteen years, scientific work in our field has covered the following topics:

• Arousing the interest and stimulating the creativity of learners towards the content of our field;
• Educational methods that work best in the didactics of our field. Methods for face-to-face and distance teaching. Complementarity between methods;
• Educational methods and systems that maintain the educational objectives achieved and demonstrated during training the longest;
• Applying educational methods and systems valid in other fields to our discipline; And vice versa;
• Objectively measuring everything listed above.

Keywords:
Engineering Education; Learning by Designing; Lifelong Learning; Evaluation Methods; Student Engagement; Digital Skills.

ERC Keywords:

• PE8_11 Product design, ergonomics, man-machine interfaces;
• PE8_7 Mechanical and manufacturing engineering (shaping, mounting, joining, separation);
• SH4_13 Education: principles, techniques, typologies.