Multidisciplinary active learning for engineering students: two pilots, one goal.

Setting-up multidisciplinary teams of industrial and civil engineering students in order to solve some practical problems in a collaborative way enables students to develop personal and interpersonal skills [1].

We will present and compare two types of projects realized for students at two campuses which are geographically dispersed: ‘physics’ for first year bachelorstudents and ‘thermotechnique’ for masterstudents.

The first project is implemented for 600 first year engineering students. The goal consists of writing a scientific paper in multidisciplinary teams of maximum four students. The huge number of students and the fact that they are in the beginning of their studies, implies that we have developed a very strict education reference frame.

The second project focuses on 100 students. The goal is to design an integrated draft of the technical installation of a building in the context of rational energy use. This specialised project requires additional personal and interpersonal skills at a high level. Both projects have a completely different approach, but the final aim consists of creating an authentic learning environment which is comparable with their future professional occupancies.