Interdisciplinary contents integration and key competences developed in a project work of industrial engineering and management third year

Abstract

The traditional curricular structure of organizing courses adopted by many university programmes is not suitable for the students to relate and integrate different interdisciplinary contents. The main consequence of this fixed structure is the students' difficulty of applying these contents in an integrated way to develop a project or just to solve a problem. Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) programme from the University of Minho, Portugal, is, for a long time, trying to break this paradigm. So, it implements Project-Based Learning (PBL) in three semesters in a five-year programme (ten semesters). Attending to the small sample (three in ten semesters) much more can be done and it does not have to be all the semesters PBL. This was the motivation for the authors of this paper to propose a common project between two courses of the IEM third year, first semester (IEM31): Production Systems Organization I and Process Control and Automation. These two courses have in common the need to design production systems and/or industrial applications to be integrated into these. The main project work objectives were to design a virtual or real-world automated production line/cell and simulate it using a hands-on activity and a cell mock-up in the classroom. Students were organized into teams of seven to ten members. This research was based on a qualitative research (case study) approach through the analysis of an on-line questionnaire. Therefore, the students' feedback to the hands-on activity was registered through the on-line questionnaire and each response was classified to address the key competencies developed by the students. The paper objectives are twofold: 1) describe the teamwork outcomes, showing the contents integration of the two courses and 2) discuss the questionnaire results, highlighting the key competences acquired. This interdisciplinary experience was implemented in two editions (2017_18 and 2019_20) and the students' feedback was very positive in