All universities strive to prepare their students as well as possible for their future careers. In engineering especially, it is vital to establish a strong connection between theoretical topics like maths and physics to real and complex engineering problems. A widespread approach in engineering education is to offer students practical project modules as a mandatory part of their studies. Beyond that, some faculties include international competitions in their curricula. Although this approach is generally viewed as effective, competitions require a lot of resources, which makes them hard to sustain. We have found that it is worthwhile for students and faculty to implement more than the minimum requirements to make hands-on projects a success story. Therefore, we outline how to elevate projects to a more professional level and what benefits result from a higher degree of professionalism. Furthermore, we review the steps taken to get to that level in a best-practice manner. We illustrate that these steps also lead to enhanced employability and an improved reputation, more external collaboration partners, and closely connected alumni for the university. To support our claims regarding those benefits, we asked representatives of supporting companies and the faculty to provide testimony regarding the cooperation with the student project. Additionally, we conducted a survey among students that clearly indicates how students profit from a strong connection to the faculty.

Modern engineering careers increasingly demand handling sophisticated physical models to forecast the behavior of technical systems. This requires students to learn and understand how to use numerical tools and evaluate their suitability based on engineering problems. This goes hand in hand with the mathematical, physical, and engineering foundations like signal processing, technical mechanics, and energy networks. It also includes a large number of programming abilities, rendering the challenge very demanding and interdisciplinary. Even though teaching and learning should encompass the whole modeling and simulation process, most textbooks only address individual parts of this interdisciplinary and, above all, application-oriented challenge, as they usually focus on very specific methods. Consequently, students currently do not sufficiently acquire a comprehensive set of tools to reach a high level of competencies. This paper presents a new approach tailored to overcome the above-mentioned shortcomings. The core idea is to bring theories (maths and physics), modeling (how to grasp the right picture of reality), and simulation (transfer of models into code and simulation) as closely together as possible and interlink them as seamlessly as possible. This is realized by creating a textbook directly related to practical examples and engineering applications hosted on an interactive website. Here, it was necessary to make the online content as interactive and result-driven as possible. This allows students to experience theory and methods primarily as tools for successfully solving engineering tasks. Students are trained in handling existing libraries with standard procedures, with which a large class of problems can be accounted for. This skill is required by many employers today. In this paper, we discuss in detail how and for which content we realized these threads. The impact of this new approach was tested with several cohorts in Department of Engineering and Communication of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (DEC). In this paper, we also present a summary of the feedback we gathered through a triangulated observation method as well as questionnaires.

Interdisciplinary, complex projects with real-world characteristics offer students great opportunities to expand their knowledge, especially if it goes beyond their core competencies. For engineers, such projects can be an additional motivation to acquire non-technical competencies and soft skills they can use in their professional lives. In traditional engineering programs, access to such additional knowledge is rarely available, maybe only in supplementary courses which are not part of the regular study program. We have developed a new, customized elective module on cost and production management to close this potential gap. The course is geared towards job-related requirements by adjusting it to an extracurricular global student competition. The theoretical content was purposefully selected to directly apply to closely related real-world problems that students must solve in this competition. Specifically, lectures on cost and production management techniques were self-reliantly prepared and presented to the rest of the course by each participant after prior consultation with peer instructors. The professional docent mainly acted as a mentor and helped give the contents an overall structure and perspective. Thus, the course setting and content allowed engineering students to engage with highly useful non-technical topics in an activating, peer-centered manner. The core element of our teaching approach is that students acquire their knowledge through problem-based learning and engage with the subject matter in an activating way. In this manuscript, we show how participants have perceived our teaching approach and discuss the requirements and opportunities for making it a profound learning experience. We also discuss how the connection to specific technical aspects was used as a means to enhance learning in non-technical courses.

Quality diversity algorithms can be used to efficiently create a diverse set of solutions to inform engineers' intuition. But quality diversity is not efficient in very expensive problems, needing hundreds of thousands of evaluations. Even with the assistance of surrogate models, quality diversity needs hundreds or even thousands of evaluations, which can make its use infeasible. In this study, we try to tackle this problem by using a pre-optimization strategy on a lower-dimensional optimization problem and then map the solutions to a higher-dimensional case. For a use case to design buildings that minimize wind nuisance, we show that we can predict flow features around 3D buildings from 2D flow features around building footprints. For a diverse set of building designs, by sampling the space of 2D footprints with a quality diversity algorithm, a predictive model can be trained that is more accurate than when trained on a set of footprints that were selected with a space-filling algorithm like the Sobol sequence. Simulating only 16 buildings in 3D, a set of 1,024 building designs with low predicted wind nuisance is created. We show that we can produce better machine learning models by producing training data with quality diversity instead of using common sampling techniques. The method can bootstrap generative design in a computationally expensive 3D domain and allow engineers to sweep the design space, understanding wind nuisance in early design phases.

To successfully teach students utilizing a project-based learning approach, lecturers need deep technical expertise and experience, soft skills, and didactic competencies, usually obtained over years of a professional career path. In this paper, we show how advanced high potential senior students that participate intensively in international engineering competitions can successfully act as self-reliant peer teachers for first-year students after receiving training in teaching and leadership skills. We explain how such high potential peers can set up a tailor-made project teaching approach based on their content-wise semi-professional expertise. We also highlight their preparation for this task and their own benefits from this activity. In particular, computer-aided design and electronic circuit board design were taught by the peer lecturers based on examples from their expertise in semi-professional formula race car design. At the same time, professors acted solely as mentors and course organizers. Performance analysis showed that not only did the course participants achieve excellent learning outcomes, but also that the peer teachers benefited enormously: In focus groups and interviews we learned that the high potential students obtained a much deeper understanding of the topics they taught self-reliantly. The experience of successfully teaching complex technical knowledge also resulted in increased self-confidence and prepared them to take over responsibility in future leadership positions. Furthermore, various prerequisites for a successful peer teaching approach were identified, e.g., the motivation to teach innovative content required in professional environments and a close long-term connection between student groups and the faculty.In conclusion, our faculty views the participation of expert students in the teaching process as a greatly beneficial addition to the overall course program. It gives student teachers and learners desirable opportunities for new learning experiences and professors the possibility to concentrate on personal mentoring activities.

Motivation to learn is a cornerstone for learning success. It can be promoted through active participation, reference to the topic, and a good learning atmosphere. One way to ensure an active role for the learner is through project-based learning approaches, which offer the opportunity to work on complex tasks that go far beyond classic theoretical modules. A rarely tried approach in an academic context to foster a good learning atmosphere and students’ connection to the topic would be to use highly qualified peers as instructors.As we strive to increase the level of understanding, we explore how peer teaching by specially trained senior student teachers can be set up in application-oriented project modules to augment learning outcomes for engineering university learners. To do so, the modules “Applied Computer-Aided Design” and “Applied Electronic Circuit Design” were chosen. We investigate in which respect the learning process is altered if advanced peers act as teachers. We also discuss what abilities are prerequisites for the students to act as peer teachers. They include experience in team leadership and project management, accompanied by strong technical skills.A survey-based analysis shows that participants significantly improved their technical skills compared to their level before the project. Furthermore, the data clearly indicates that learners felt more comfortable participating actively in the course if it was taught by a peer familiar with specific real-world applications compared to when it was led by professors. In addition, students were motivated because they were able to choose their own project as well as being encouraged and assisted in working on their own. In conclusion, we show that course modules taught by specifically trained and selected peer teachers can be a valuable addition to an overall engineering curriculum.

In contrast to traditional ways on how to teach engineering students, modern concepts include problem-based learning approaches, offering the possibility to include project courses in the curriculum. As a step beyond, large international competition formats arose in recent years, offering very complex tasks that are not feasible to be treated in one (or few) regular courses only. That is, because they are often organized by industry-related consortia, aiming for a different education perspective that increases employability. In a natural way, such projects value deeper understanding of theory modules, but emphasize on the transfer to practical solutions. Since the origin does not come from university staff, participation in such competitions is based on student efforts and organization, creating a unique level of demand and ownership that can only be inflamed by very high motivation. In order to sustain such large-scale projects from the faculty’s perspective, the combination of in- and off-curricular elements can help to lower the students’ workload to feasible levels. Seamlessly integrated, this enhances learning experiences and helps to keep project members highly motivated and productive. In this paper, we present the idea and impact of an additional graduation certificate as a means to stabilize such large-scale projects by providing a framework and enhancing motivation in the students. By way of doing so, the university can give formal credit for the informal learning and valuable knowledge acquired in off-curricular activities. We discuss which certificate elements were determined to be useful and how our findings were solidified by a detailed survey. Even though this work centers on a specific example, we will emphasize the general conclusions that can be drawn and which guidelines might be transferred to similar other projects.

A traditional way to teach bachelor students in electrical engineering is organized such that theoretical knowledge is predominant in the first year while applications and practical experiences are reserved for later stages of their education. In this contribution, we want to introduce a reverse approach: In a freshmen course at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Science, students gain hands-on experience with resistances, condensers and other active parts, like transistors or relays from the very first day. We present how the combination of practical experience directly linked with theoretical knowledge enhances students' learning. It promotes deeper understanding of the theory and a better transfer between theory and practice. This teaching approach is adapted to address two main goals: First, to give practical experience to first-semester students as a basis for further laboratory and working situations. Second, to create a deeper and more sustainable understanding of physics by directly observing the effects that are described in formulas. The key to success is to find an efficient solution to carry out this approach with the given spatial and financial resources - which means, to do it in the lecture hall with very few material resources. To show that this innovative teaching concept really enhances the competencies of the students, an innovative evaluation approach was used where the students have to reflect upon their competencies before and after the course.

In this contribution we present the concept for creating an “International Chair” position at a German University of Applied Sciences and our experiences in its first implementation. Our primary goal was to increase the diversity of the university's teaching personalities and enrich student education by including content, methods, examples and experiences from other cultures. This gives students an international and intercultural learning experience that is otherwise only acquired through studying abroad. We conclude that the International Chair is a valuable and powerful university tool for increasing international exposure to the departments, their staff and students.

In this contribution we briefly recap the general concept of the BRSU Race Academy. We then concentrate on and demonstrate how practical projects can be set up and executed within this framework. We discuss what is needed to train the members of the Race Academy properly and how the faculty advisor could change his course of action during the projects. The feedback and the results of such projects have been extremely positive so far: The Race Academy members have been perceived as role models to their peers, and an efficient peer-group atmosphere could be set up that facilitated learning. With their experience, solid user knowledge and the close contact to several industrial partners, a productive, authentic and practical working atmosphere has been established. We will give examples of how to use our new teaching approach to surpass the qualities of classes held in the traditional way. Furthermore, it is shown that the technical understanding is improved, as well as the personal experience to work with and integrate into a professional team.

At the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (BRSU), Germany, students of engineering sciences are trained in thinking and acting like an engineer right from the start - by creating a Rube Goldberg machine in an introductory project, organized with SCRUM techniques