PUKHA: a new pedagogical experience

Abstract

Society needs responsible leaders and entrepreneurs. CDIO (conceive, design, implement and operate) is a framework for engineering education based on outcomes, more than on contents, that has been adopted by a growing number of engineering educational institutions for producing the next generation of engineering leaders. In order to support engineering students to become entrepreneurs and to bear other concerns than merely technical on today's rapid changing world, the authors believe the CDIO syllabus needs to be improved, and therefore propose a pre requisite to a useful CDIO perspective: IdEF, standing for Identify, Evaluate and Formulate real problems and needs. Based on this concept, this paper describes a new pedagogical project framework (PUKHA - to project, to undertake, to know how to achieve). Within PUKHA projects, more than 300 students have trained and checked their will, risk, responsibility, communication, leadership and entrepreneurship over the last three years.

Keywords:

• CDIO
• IdEF-CDIO
• Students
• Leadership
• Pedagogy
• PUKHA

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the students, colleagues and businessmen engaged on this work, such as the Students’ Association, the Pedagogic Council and the Direction of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto for their support, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.