Gathering experience in project-based learning environments is very important for students of almost all subjects, but especially for engineering students, who will mostly work in teams with team members who are likely to come from different fields. The Department of Engineering and Communication at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (HBRS) in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the form of so-called “project weeks”. Three weeks of each semester are dedicated to real-life projects in addition to the normal lectures [1]. Besides the experience of working in a project-based environment, it is important to expose students to new ideas of how to work as a successful team. Agile methods [2] such as New Work (freedom and independence), DevOps (wanting to do a good job, trying to understand other team members, wanting to learn new things, wanting to try something new) and Scrum (sprint planning, daily Scrum, using Kanban board and burn down chart) were used in interdisciplinary projects combining two different fields: Materials Science and Computer Science. This paper aims to start a discussion on how to apply and teach agile methods and new work ideas to engineering students. So far, the authors do not have enough data and experience to feel able to choose a specific method for measuring learning outcomes.

A multipurpose software tool for building web apps and software-based Open Education Resources, called “Digital Makerspace” (DMS), was developed in the last 8 years at the applied university and is now ready for use. The tool is useful for creating and designing almost all thinkable material and tools for online usage by web users, for example providing digital learning material and digital interactive exercises. The tool is free for use for everyone and is supposed to be self-explaining. In this paper, the DMS is introduced and as an example multi-purpose learning material for students are shown which were designed via the DMS.

This paper describes the use of quizzes in different learning scenarios. Using quizzes stimulates the student's cognitive understanding as described in many sources in the literature. Via quizzes students will not be only trained in keeping knowledge, they are also coached in analytical thinking. By the usage of quizzes a kind of “learning on demand” is possible which is entertaining and prepares students well for their examinations. Several types of quizzes exit, like single-choice, multiple-choice, numeric, and text fill in, and the main task for lecturers is formulating questions and exercises. To make better use of this conceptual and creative work, it is beneficial to use questions for more than one activity during the learning process of the students. However, these usages require different tools with different formats for stating a question, possible answers, and specifying one or more correct answers. Thus, two software programs were implemented, a Windows tool to convert questions for quizzes into different formats, and an app for mobile offline-usage on a smartphone. The paper describes the usage of quiz questions in different classroom, and e-learning settings, including lectures, online quizzes on websites, smartphones, in learning management systems (LMS), and in examinations. The educational setting includes courses and examinations offered to bachelor engineering students in the first year of their study as well as master students. Evaluation is performed by observing usage on the platforms, looking at the total number of usages as well as on the time when students use the quizzes, i.e. during the semester or before examinations. Also, exam results for the questions have been looked at and give indications about the learning success of students. At the moment, the software is a prototype and proof of concept. However, it is not safe against errors in the input format and only supports the open-source LMS (Learning Management System) ILIAS. More work is required to make it usable for further lecturers. Also, the mobile app is only available for Android and it could be converted to a framework for releasing Android and iOS versions (for Apple iPhone).

In this paper we present a new initiative to promote collaborative learning through industry partnered, interdisciplinary, student and user centred projects. This was achieved through the development of rehabilitation devices augmented with gamified software. Today development of software systems often requires people from different specialities who can work in multidisciplinary teams to achieve a common objective. A key challenge, therefore, is producing graduates with an understanding of a number of disparate skills across many discipline boundaries. Undergraduates may be knowledgeable in one specific discipline but will not be aware of the issues brought to bear by other relevant disciplines. In an effort to overcome this limitation, a cross-discipline course “Serious Games and Welfare Technology” was developed that allows students from different disciplines to work together to produce innovative, technology- supported health solutions. The course, an EU funded Erasmus+ initiative, was supported by a MOOC and enabled multi- disciplined and multinational teams to produce solutions for leading Health technology companies in the areas of rehabilitation and aging support. Following the first year of offering the course with a cohort of students from 5 countries, we report on the experiences and outcomes achieved from a number of viewpoints.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress Paper describes an outcome-based evaluation performed over three consecutive courses taught to electrical engineering students. The courses are delivered in the study entry phase: Computer Science 1 and 2 in the first and second semester and Digital Design in the third semester. The outcome-based evaluation was introduced to evaluate the progress made by students during the courses. Covering three semesters taught by two different lecturers, it gives a long-term view of the learning process in the study entry phase. The “outcome-based evaluation” methodology is proposed in literature and was introduced at our university at the end of 2016. Particular attention needs to be paid to formulating the questionnaire. The lecturers therefore cooperate with an evaluation officer from the university.

At the last Educon conference three practices were shared about how to handle large classrooms full of students as a short paper: Pingo with concept test questions, workshop-kind-of interactions to do peer-reviews and presenting at the first lecture of the semester only problems of the subject to be taught announcing that all those problems can be solved with the knowledge of the course. This paper will introduce two more methods newly applied in the winter and summer term 2015/16: using videos for very complicated parts of the subject matter and mixing instructing and explaining sections with exercising phases. The methods will be described and personal experiences will be reported.

To handle large classrooms of students is a every-"lecture"-challenge that requires the lecturer to constantly apply new ideas and new practices so as to keep the students focused and to stay in touch with them. Furthermore, these ideas have to be adjusted from lecture to lecture. The purpose of this paper is to share experiences with some new, recently popular and with some older practices, such as classroom interactions via smartphone response, workshop-like interactions and starting the first lecture each term by presenting only problems within the subject to teach. All methods are supposed to increase the concentration level of the students and to enable an effective lecturer-students interaction. Briefly these methods/practices are described and also the way in which they were used, prepared and organized, how they worked out, how the students reacted and how the lecturer felt about it and experienced the various methods during large classroom lectures. All described methods were used while teaching programming (a two-semester computer science course) to electrical and mechanical engineering first year students at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in the last couple of years.

To give students studying Electrical or Mechanical Engineering at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences a smoother beginning, three weeks in the first semester are used for project-based learning and self-learning exercises. The project-based learning part is used to do short-term projects (1 to 3 days) to motivate all the different subjects (mathematics, computer sciences, microcontrollers, principles of electrical engineering, measurement engineering and others) engineering students have to study during their time at the university and show the connection between these subjects. Short-term projects allow an insight into the real world of engineering, improve the student motivation, and enable students to develop soft skills. If projects like this are done in the beginning of the study it also helps them tremendously to connect to their fellow students. Further, there is the intention to prepare a situation where students “feel like engineers”. This paper presents a three full-day (organised on three days with four weeks gaps in between) course in the winter term 2014 using LEGO Mindstorm robot kits to give students an easy access to programming, algorithms, sensor technology, robotics and much more.

Collecting experiences in project-based learning environments is very important for students of almost all subjects. Especially, for engineering students who mostly work in teams later on. The department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (HBRS) in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the so called “project weeks”. Three weeks of a semester are available to do some realworld projects besides the normal lectures [1]. In the last three summer terms since 2011 the organisation of a Lego-robots contest for High School kids was used as a realworld project for the project weeks at HBRS. The university students had to prepare and execute the contest in order to get their credit points for the project. This includes: find an overall motto of the contest, invent and prepare funny and interesting tasks for the robot-parcour, handle money issues, organize the two days of the contest including a welcome-show, meals, do calculation to score the winner team and do the final award ceremony. Preparing the contest provides project-related learning elements as well as engineering and team-development challenging elements. So it enables the students to connect theory and practice and to apply knowledge and skills to solve practical problems. The following article describes how the idea of organizing a robots contest for High School kids made its way to a student project, how the project was organized by the lecturer, how the three project weeks were organized and what feedback was obtained at the end by the students.

Understanding the functionality of real-world machines and thinking about their improvements is a method to deepen the acquired knowledge of electrical and mechanical engineering students. The Department of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Technical Journalism of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the so-called “project weeks”. Three weeks of a term are available to do some real-world projects besides the regular courses [1]. This provides a “project-based” learning environment that enables the students to connect theory and practice and to apply knowledge and skills to solve practical problems. In the winter term 2012/13 an unusual open-defined project was offered for the first time to third-semester students showing high potentials. The students were presented with an unknown embroidery machine and their task was to improve it, depending on their knowledge and abilities. This article describes a project in which an embroidery machine was used as a basis for developing better understanding of many aspects of electrical and mechanical engineering.

The determination of invariant characteristics is an important problem in pattern recognition. Many invariants are known, which have been obtained either by normalization or by other methods. This paper shows that the method of normalization is much more general and allows one to derive a lot of sets of invariants from the second list as well. To this end, the normalization method is generalized and is presented in such a way that it is easy to apply, thus unifying and simplifying the determination of invariants. Furthermore, this paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the invariants obtained by normalization. Their main advantage is that the normalization process provides us with a standard position of the object. Because of the generality of the method, also new invariants are obtained such as normalized moments more stable than known ones, Legendre descriptors and Zernike descriptors to affine transformations, two-dimensional Fourier descriptors and affine moment invariants obtained by combining Hu's moment invariants and normalized moments.