Multilevel Design Education for Innovation Competencies

AbstractThe competencies to manage an engineering project, work in and lead a team are demanded from a graduate of a higher engineering education. A design education model, consisting of of two linked courses, is presented that allows students to learn key engineering and social competencies by experiencing real situations. During the course “Innovation Project” (IP) approx. 450 freshman solve a development task in a team (creating a mechatronic system). The course “Leading Engineering Projects and Coaching Design Teams” educates IP student coaches in team dynamics and how to coach an innovation team. The aim of this paper is to present the recent development of the educational model. In this paper we focus on the IP course. The team climate curves are analysed and the qualitative data describing the turning points in the team climate curves is used to derive critical competencies for the IP teams. Four different competency clusters were found. The results show that not only technical skills are learned in this course but even more so multidisciplinary skills. The influence of the coaches for competency development is ongoing research and will be evaluated in further research. The results underline the need for educational approaches that focus on technical skills as well as multidisciplinary skills. The education model prepares the students well for their future design challenges