Design Of The Advanced Engineering Project Course For The Third Year Of Electrical Engineering At Telecom BCN

The Advanced Engineering Project is the third of four steps in the design-implement subjects path of the Telecom BCN curricula. The first and second steps, the Introduction to Engineering subject and the Basic Engineering Project subject were described in the two last CDIO Conferences. The first year subject [1] includes a partially guided project through a complex system, but with low technical difficulty. The second year project [2] has a higher technical difficulty and emphasizes the modular structure of complex ICT systems, although a working team only develops one of the system blocks. In the third year course, Advanced Engineering Project, AEP, which is described in this paper, larger working groups should conceive, design, implement and operate a whole system including its business plan. During the fourth and last year, the individual students join a research department or company to perform their final thesis.

The AEP topic is specific for each degree (electronics, networks, audiovisual systems and communication systems), is performed by larger teams (9-12 students), and each project is unique. The product or system to be designed and built in AEP should be complex enough to need its breakdown in 3-4 subsystems. Then, 3-4 subteams of 2-3 students design, build and test their specific subsystem and integrate it with the others in order to complete and test the full system.

The course has 12 ECTS credits which means 300 h of workload per person along the semester (15 weeks). The main part of this time is devoted to autonomous work, but the students also attend to seminars (2 hours per week) and have supervised attendance to the lab 6 hours per week. There are short seminars (system thinking, intellectual property rights, patent search, team work, …) and longer seminars (several sessions) on how to prepare a business plan. The two projects developed this year with the pilot group have been a picosatellite (CubeSat) and a system to obtain a map of the acoustic response of a room.