Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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class (Implement), a closing session with a presentation to third parties and a “postmortem”
session (Observing the project result).
Figure 2: Sprint project structure
The opening session includes the description of the project’s objectives, the context of the
proposed challenge, the definition of the work groups and an initial phase of the plan for
developing the Sprint-P. The support activity varies according to the subject to be
developed. Its goal is to complement the information obtained both in the opening session
and in documents, to support the design activity. Therefore expert guest speakers are
invited, lab practices are performed, visits to businesses and demonstrations of partial or
total solutions to the problem addressed by the Sprint-P are presented. The
demonstrations should be student projects of advanced semesters analyzing a similar
problem of the Sprint-P. This allows for an articulation of results from different courses
and a deeper knowledge about the subjects and abilities that will be developed throughout
the curriculum. The team work (outside of class) is shown through design reports and
presentations of the proposals, their achievement and results. The closing session is an
oral presentation of the written work that is handed. This presentation includes the
process followed to develop the Sprint-P, the difficulties, the achievements, and it is
supported by material such as videos, demos and wiki publications. During this closing
session evaluation by the teacher, teaching assistants, the students and external persons
(teachers and advanced students) is performed. The observation of the process, the
impact of the organization of the group work and the results obtained are matter for
reflection and for a closing report of the project.
There are not strong restrictions with the Sprint-P project’s topic. They are related to
information technologies. There is no intention of being complete in the coverage of ICT
areas or the problems in the systems and computing engineering profession. The purpose
is rather, in the first project to come into contact with the process of addressing an
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011