Project-based learning as a bridge to the industrial practice

It is expected that engineering students develop both technical and transversal competences for the professional practice during their initial training period. The development of such competences can benefit from the interaction with real industrial contexts. Since project-based learning is an educational approach in which teams of students can tackle a given problem related to their future professional practice, this will be an outstanding opportunity to bring them together with industrial engineering professionals throughout the whole degree period and not only at its end. In this way, teachers will facilitate the development of the expected professional competences. This work aims to analyse a project-based learning approach that has involved six teams of students dealing with real industrial problems and challenges, and to evaluate the results based on the proposed technical solutions, as well as on the perception of five companies' representatives. Most of the proposed solutions were centred on Lean applications and ergonomic improvements of the analysed workplaces. Companies were very pleased with the developed projects and are willing to continue the interaction with the university in this context.This work was funded by COMPETE-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT-UID-CEC-00319-2013