Engineers Without Borders Challenge: Implementing Sustainability in German Engineering Education

Abstract

she gained her doctorate in the field of e-learning, likewise with a distinction. In the years 2010 and 2011 she received the International E-Learning Award (IELA) for the projects ROLE and RELOAD with the e-learning solutions developed under her leadership. Furthermore, she is a lecturer at the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of the RWTH Aachen University for a course on learning and work habits (compulsory elective subject for the degree course in Mechanical Engineering). Her main areas of research are the development of agile turbulence-tolerant processes and organizational concepts for knowledge and technology-intensive organizations, the development of knowledge management solutions and e-learning tools (e.g. knowledge maps) for various fields, as well as accompanying research for complex organizational development processes in heterogeneous research networks. Paper ID #18873 remote laboratories, intelligent assistants, semantic coding of specialised information). Sabina Jeschke is vice dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the RWTH Aachen University, chairwoman of the board of management of the VDI Aachen and member of the supervisory board of the Körber AG. She is a member and consultant of numerous committees and commissions, alumni of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), IEEE Senior Member and Fellow of the RWTH Aachen University. In July 2014, the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) honoured her with their award Deutschlands digitale Köpfe (Germany's digital heads). In September 2015 she was awarded the Nikola-Tesla Chain by the International Society of Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP) for her outstanding achievements in the field of engineering pedagogy. AbstractThe twenty-first century is highly influenced by globalization, climate change and an increasing dependence on technologies. Education in general needs to foster these trends, but especially engineering education needs to impart knowledge about the necessity and the possibilities of sustainable development to students. The Engineers Without Borders (EWB)Challenge offers an innovative opportunity to integrate sustainability into engineering curricula. Although the EWB Challenge is well established in other countries, RWTH Aachen University is the only university in Germany that has implemented the EWB Challenge into the engineering curricula so far.This paper aims at presenting the process of implementing the EWB Challenge in Germany. In the course of this implementation, the concept was evaluated with the help of a standardized questionnaire; an overview of the results gained from this evaluation is provided in this paper as well. The evaluation served to gain diverse information e.g. about the perception of the challenge in general, its impact on the amount of knowledge gained by the students, and also about the challenge's potentials for improvement. First analyses show, that the overall quality of the EWB Challenge at RWTH Aachen University was marked as "good". Asides from that, the analyses al...

Board 97 : Sustainable Development Goals Meet “Third Mission”: The Engineers Without Borders Challenge in Germany

“…In the winter semester 2012/13, the EWB Challenge was tested in Germany for the first time. Since then, it has been regularly practiced in several courses at RWTH Aachen university (Willicks et al 2017a). Tasks that have previously been presented to the students were, for example, the technical design of low-tech tools for the material supply of biogas plants (country of application: Tanzania) or the optimization of emergency shelters after strong earthquakes (country of application: Nepal).…”

“…Since its first run, the EWB Challenge has been continuously evaluated by a standardized questionnaire that has been developed especially for this purpose and that the participating students completed at the end of each semester. The structure of this evaluation and the results have already been discussed in detail (Willicks et al 2017a;Willicks et al 2017b). To sum up, it can be said, that the overall quality of the EWB Challenge at RWTH Aachen university was marked as "good".…”