The development of vital competencies and a mindset to rethink products, production, and business models in engineering and design students is presently of great importance. These future professionals will play a key role in the development of sustainable products. Within Eco-design and Eco-efficiency curricular unit, an assignment was developed…

This research examines regional skill problems and the strategies adopted to reduce skill shortages by a set of employers (n = 16). The data collected in 2019 in a northern region in Portugal indicate considerable and persistent shortages of engineering and IT graduates and non-graduates for operational jobs. The employers implement anticipative…

This position paper sets out to examine value creation in the engineering enterprise, a process that has mostly been associated with innovation and entrepreneurs. An analysis of the literature on engineering value creation in business studies, engineering and engineering education publications shows that there has been surprisingly little…

Intellectual property includes not only copyright but also industrial property (IP), which consists of inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs and models, and designations of origin. In order to identify the importance of these competencies of non-lawyers, e.g. engineers, managers, in companies, an online survey was conducted in some…

The problem of assigning students to teams can be described as maximising their profiles diversity within teams while minimising the differences among teams. This problem is commonly known as the maximally diverse grouping problem and it is usually formulated as maximising the sum of the pairwise distances among students within teams. We propose…

The recent phenomenon of worldwide declining enrolments in engineering-related degrees has led to the gradual decrease in the number of engineering graduates. This decrease occurs at a time of increasing demand in the labour market for highly qualified engineers, who are necessary for the implementation of fundamental societal functions. This…

This paper reports the results of a study of engineering students' approaches to an open-ended design problem. To carry out this, sketches and interviews were collected from 9 freshmen (first year) and 10 doctoral engineering students, when they designed solutions for orange squeezers. Sketches and interviews were analysed and mapped with a…

The recognition of the need and importance of including ethical and civic education in engineering courses, as well as the training profile on ethical issues, relies heavily on the engineer's concept and the perception of the engineering action. These views are strongly related to the different engineer education model conceptions and its…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether there is an adjustment between the Portuguese higher education supply and the needs of the labour market. Design/methodology/approach: An empirical study is performed, using a quantitative approach, relating the job offers for graduates registered at the employment centres and the number of…

This study researches how first-year engineering students perceived the influence of curricular activities on their own learning autonomy, measured with an adaptation of the Personal Responsibility Orientation to Self-direction in Learning Scale (PRO-SDLS). Participants were questioned to assess the influence of the teacher's role. The results…

Engineering design is known as an answer to an ill-defined problem. As any answer to an ill-defined problem, it can never be completely right or absolutely wrong. The methods that universities use to teach engineering design, as a consequence of this, suffer from the same fate. However, the accumulated experience with the "chalk and…

This paper reports on findings from a three-year study of project-based learning implemented in the first year of the Industrial Engineering and Management programme, at the University of Minho, Portugal. This particular model was inspired on project-led education (PLE), following Powell and Weenk's [2003. "Project-Led Engineering…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe specific techniques of "inquiry-based learning" employed by three instructors in Engineering schools, one in Europe and two in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: Theorists such as Bransford et al. argue that twenty-first century educators need to teach students to do more than simply…

Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as…

Quality in higher education is a subject of increasing importance. This idea can be supported by looking at different sources, namely, the scientific literature, national and transnational governments' policies, such as those emerging from the Bologna Process. Also, the internationalisation of higher education and, within it, students' and staff…