The decade 2005-2014 has been set by UNESCO as the United Nations decade of Education for Sustainable Development (SD) [1]. As graduate students of this decade, our vision of SD teaching targets in engineering concerns the development of attitudes to assess projects and related impacts in a systemic way, the development of transversal skills, and the collaboration between experts from different fields to facilitate sustainable decisions. These assumptions can be linked to the qualities required by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board [2]. What kind of student exercises relies on all these assumptions? As teaching assistants (TA) in the class Environmental Design and Life Cycle Thinking (GCH2220-Polytechnique Montreal), we propose a possible answer. The main goals of this class are to familiarize students with the concepts of environmental design and life cycle thinking, as well as with different existing tools to apply these concepts. As TAs, we are in charge of a project that aims at providing students an opportunity to acquire practical aspects. The subject of the project presented is the environmental redesign of coated paper production, and its main objectives are: to improve teamwork skills, to develop critical thinking when analyzing the results of an environmental assessment, and to develop skills to convince people within a company to adopt environmental solutions. In order to achieve these goals, the project was built on four main steps and students are evaluated through two reports and a poster presentation. Teams of four students were formed in order to mix students with different backgrounds (types of engineering programs, amount of credits completed) and obtain multidisciplinary teams. The project, the way it is presented in class, and its relevance for the students as future engineers are assessed through a survey in order to improve the exercise for the following classes.
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