Studios and Sustainability: A Creative CDIO Approach to Computer Engineering Education

As creativity and innovation become increasingly important in solving future electrical and computer engineering challenges, such as the end of Moore’s Law, engineering education will need to incorporate creative and global problem-solving with technical course concepts.

Creative skills and problem-solving lead to new and useful engineering processes, tools, technical and products, and development of these skills should begin early within an engineering program. Creativity within engineering encompasses a wide variety of definitions and aspects, including integration on a global scale and sustainability engineering development. Sustainability is an element of creative design that is often emphasized in other engineering disciplines while being overlooked in electrical and computer engineering. However, past research has shown that students do not view engineering as a creative career or one that allows them to make a sustainable impact on society. This paper will detail and explore the impact of a flipped classroom pilot for a required first year engineering computer-programming course, and effects on its implementation on student perceptions of engineering. This initiative uses the CDIO method to integrate sustainability, design, creativity, arts and entrepreneurship through hands-on studio experience.

This curriculum requires students to build a creative and visual-based programming portfolio using the Processing programming language, working towards the development of a final coding product. The evolution of this final product requires students to apply the four CDIO stages to either a bio-inspired visualization project or a game creation project, while incorporating elements of sustainable engineering design. A final demonstration and peer assessment also introduces an element of entrepreneurship and business presentation.

This paper will describe the pilot course design, the integration of the CDIO method with technical coding objectives, results and observations from the fall semester offering (to be completed December 2015), recommendations from these results for interested educators, and plans for future work. Preliminary results have shown students to be more engaged and motivated due to the creative CDIO design techniques introduced in parallel with technical programming concepts. The developed curriculum may also be modified for a K-12 introduction to computer engineering and programming as computer literacy becomes more prevalent within schools.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016