Course overview
The study of engineering should be accompanied by the development of soft skills that allow engineers to develop integrated work in teams and with appropriate working methodologies. The curricular unit of the Electrical Engineering Project provides soft skills that will be used by students throughout the course and during their professional activity. The curricular unit of Electrical Engineering Project is part of the 1st year, 1st semester, and is an integrative curricular unit with the following objectives:
- integrate newly admitted students into the environment of ISEP and the Department of Electrotechnical Engineering;
- make known the regulations and services available at ISEP (email, portal, moodle, library, …);
- convey important concepts such as ethics and plagiarism;
- develop some “soft Skills” relevant for the activity of an Engineer (teamwork, project and work management, reporting, communication, research methods, organization and synthesis of information, …);
- apply soft skills in the scientific discussion of a theme related to the course and launched in the first week of classes.
Participants in piloting
This course is part of the BSc in Electrical Engineering of the School of Engineering of the Porto Polytechnic.
2019/2020: 125 students
2020/2021: 131 students
Timeframe
2019/2020
2020/2021
Use of ALIEN services and tools
This course introduces students that recently entered Higher Education to problem-based learning. The course was adapted to use ALIEN’s methodological approach. The course follows a PBL approach from start: a problem in the Electrical Engineering domain is proposed to the teams (up to 5 students) who have to study the problem, find the necessary resources, prepare a presentation on the problem and identify potential solutions. The goal of the course is actually to develop personal and social skills, foster the integration of the students in Higher Education and prepare them to another course who also adopted PBL.
