ABSTRACT Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving... more ABSTRACT Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving abilities and technical competencies. Engineering education must offer proficient technical competences and also train engineers to think and act ethically. A technical ‘engineering-like’ focus and demand have made educators and students overlook the importance of ethical awareness and transversal competences. Using two Finnish surveys, conducted in 2014 and 2016, we examine how engineers perceive working life needs regarding ethics. The data consider different age groups. We research whether an engineer’s age affects their perception of the importance of ethics in their work and if there are differences between young experts and young managers in their use of ethics within work. The results indicate that practising engineers do not consider ethical issues important in their work. This especially applies to younger engineers; the older an engineer, the more important they consider ethics. No statistically significant difference was found between young engineering experts and managers.
Lecturer, previously visiting Professor, in the School of Engineering, in the Mechanical Engineer... more Lecturer, previously visiting Professor, in the School of Engineering, in the Mechanical Engineering Design Group, makes it possible for teams to find unmet user needs using her proven methods-from a socio-cognitive psychology, art and applied design thinking perspective-that she has developed and refined over the past few decades. In addition, she teaches some of these methods to engineering, design, business, and law students. Barbara uses applied psychology and art in her storytelling methods, to help students and leaders traverse across the iterative stages of a projects-from the early, inspirational stages to reality. Founder of the Design Entrepreneuring Studio, she is the author of,"Working Connection: The Relational Art of Leadership;" "Entrepreneurial Leadership: A Balancing Act in Engineering and Science;" and "Designing for Social Participation in the Virtual Universe." With her students in ME 378, she co-authored, "The Power of First Moments in Entrepreneurial Storytelling." Barbara makes productive partnerships with industry and creates collaborative teams with members from the areas of engineering, design, psychology and communication. Her recent work examines perceived differences in on-line and off-line lives; and ways to generate creative work environments. She also bridges the intersection of Silicon Valley and Hollywood in a leadership initiative.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2015
This paper offers blueprints for and reports upon three years experience from teaching the univer... more This paper offers blueprints for and reports upon three years experience from teaching the university course "Lean Software Startup" for information technology and economics students. The course aims to give a learning experience on ideation/innovation and subsequent product and business development using the lean startup method. The course educates the students in software business, entrepreneurship, teamwork and the lean startup method. The paper describes the pedagogical design and practical implementation of the course in sufficient detail to serve as an example of how entrepreneurship and business issues can be integrated into a software engineering curriculum. The course is evaluated through learning diaries and a questionnaire, as well as the primary teacher's learnings in the three course instances. We also examine the course in the context of CDIO and show its connection points to this broader engineering education framework. Finally we discuss the challenges and opportunities of engaging students with different backgrounds in a hands-on entrepreneurial software business course.
2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings
is a Ph.D. candidate in computational mechanics and biomechanics at Stanford University. Her rese... more is a Ph.D. candidate in computational mechanics and biomechanics at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the finite element and continuum mechanics modeling of the airways in chronic lung disease. She is involved in engineering education through Stanford Design School's educating young STEM thinkers course series and prominently through leading I-Cubed: Inspectors, Inquirers, Inventors!, a non-profit startup summer camp for underrepresented student groups to gain exposure to STEM. Mona is dedicated to educating the next generation of engineers.
ABSTRACT Multiple disciplines approach, which includes interdisciplinarity, has been discussed in... more ABSTRACT Multiple disciplines approach, which includes interdisciplinarity, has been discussed in the engineering education context from the early 21st Century [1]. There is very little disagreement about its importance for the engineers. The key question has been how? How to implement theory into practice both in the curriculum and in the actual learning enhancement phase? Both Problem-based learning [2] and CDIO framework [1] are constructivist learning approaches [3] that emphasize these issues. In this paper, we discuss and elaborate some of the learning results of two interdisciplinary master's level student teams that were structurally organized as Capstone project courses [4]. The course projects had ill-defined and openended problem setting. The coaching for students was organized from the departments of Information Technology and Nursing Science at University of Turku. Students that participated in the project represented 3 higher education institutions and 8 disciplines. The disciplines were nursing science, engineering, sustainable development, computer science, social science, educational science, business and administration as well as futures studies. Altogether there were fifteen (15) students from two (2) different nationalities in this study. The results show that in a teamwork and problem oriented and project based setting [5] the learning of professional skills of the students can be enhanced both at the team and the individual level. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary learning happens inside the teams and it depends on the time used, structure of the facilitation process and the general team dynamics. This is, however, not always the case and the possible reasons for this will be discussed.
This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Deve... more This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to...
Product development and front-end project management with an emphasis on learning-by doing educat... more Product development and front-end project management with an emphasis on learning-by doing educational philosophy is seen as one possible answer for closing the gap between industry expectations for graduate’s working life skills and the actual learning enhancement provided by the academia. The question is not so much why, nor it is what. For these we have had an abundance of answers since early 1960’s. The question is how? How to implement hands-on doing focusing on relevant working life skills such as project working capabilities in a teamwork setting, design thinking and communication skills, in addition to the actual disciplinary knowledge. This paper reports preliminary results from a work-in-progress study that analyses the course structure, teaching philosophy and learning outcomes of a course that aims to provide relevant product development, team– based project working and project management skills in an open-ended environment to students. The key research question was what...
The need for creative engineers using natural sciences as their approach has not drastically chan... more The need for creative engineers using natural sciences as their approach has not drastically changed in the past 100 years. However, technology advances have created new challenges and brought new ...
Engineering education in the department of Information Technology at the University of Turku, Fin... more Engineering education in the department of Information Technology at the University of Turku, Finland, follows the CDIO framework. In this paper, we examine the first evolution of the Introduction to Engineering course. The course is based on the CDIO standard no. 4, and it is the very first course for the engineering students when they commence their studies. The background and structure for the course as well as its intended learning outcomes will be presented. Key research questions are how the students and the teaching team have understood the course’s learning outcomes, and how the teaching team has been able to adopt the learning outcomes into the course structure. The research material has been gathered from the two consecutive courses during December 2012 – December 2013. The research material comprises of study journals and feedback that was collected after the course. The questions used in both surveys and study journals were based on intended learning outcomes and partly ...
Changing from a traditional classroom and lecture-based teaching mode to a CDIO-based engineering... more Changing from a traditional classroom and lecture-based teaching mode to a CDIO-based engineering education is not easy for either teachers or students, especially in a doubledegree setting combining different kinds of cultural approaches. In this paper, we examined how students in a Double Master’s Degree Programme between University of Turku, Finland and Fudan University, China adjusted to the change from traditional classroom lecturing to a coached peer-to-peer teaching. The change was supported by a teaching team and catalyzed with hands-on practices in a specifically designed intensive two-week Capstone introductory course - Capstone Bootcamp, which included one-week theoretical preparation and one-week hands-on workshop employing integrated learning and active learning. The course aimed to eliminate students’ confusion about ―Capstone‖, get them aligned in a new environment, and help them quickly find their roles when doing a Capstone project in the coming autumn semester with...
All material supplied via Aaltodoc is protected by copyright and other intellectual property righ... more All material supplied via Aaltodoc is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user.
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
This work-in-progress study reports the first findings from an engineering curriculum design proc... more This work-in-progress study reports the first findings from an engineering curriculum design process in an East African context. The design of new programs and teaching practices involves three universities with local faculty designing a new engineering curriculum with external experts involved in the design process. Innovation is something that in addition to societies and industries also the global academia is striving towards, and not only in research but more and more so also in education [1]. The big question, however, is how to achieve this and how to make innovation happen inside the classroom when the faculty needs to push the boundaries of science while at the same time being transformative educators [2]. And all this in a global higher education environment, where well-established institutions are in the cross pressure of neoliberal worldview and the humboldtian ideal of the community of scholars [neoliberal]. On the other end innovation and creativity are argued to be pro...
The future of learning is being revolutionized by challenge based learning (CBL), where academia ... more The future of learning is being revolutionized by challenge based learning (CBL), where academia offers solutions to reallife challenges. Unfortunately, in developing countries academia overlook the importance of involving stakeholders whoare the prospective owners of the solutions developed. This is because of the weak link between academic institutions andindustry in research and development activities. However, to solve real life challenges faced by the society the researchersneed to work closely and continuously with the targeted community for them to get the sense of ownership and for thesolutions to take into account all relevant factors. This paper presents the impacts realized when eight stakeholders werefully involved from identification to developing solutions of the challenges facing the electrical power sector in Tanzaniawhich is wholly managed by a public utility company TANESCO from generation to distribution. Challenge based coursesintroducedin taught PhD and MScprogr...
This paper presents the results from train-the-trainer workshop held for Tanzanian university fac... more This paper presents the results from train-the-trainer workshop held for Tanzanian university faculty from four different universities. The aim of the workshop was to build entrepreneurial education capacity and competencies of local faculty. Findings from the workshop were planned to be integrated into the existing curricula of the universities together with activating and student-centred teaching methods. Main approaches were Problem based Learning and Design thinking.
When prompted to imagine the story of today’s top engineering graduate, one might imagine a succe... more When prompted to imagine the story of today’s top engineering graduate, one might imagine a successful leader and innovator in this ‘research to practice’ full paper. Changes in the emotional responses of today’s college students pose an intriguing question: can generational differences in emotion suggest a shift in entrepreneurial mind-set and leadership choices post-engineering education? This paper uses modified original protocol developed by Horner (1972) on gendered generalizations of professional success and Engle’s (2003) updated approach for considering responses about occupational choice. The researchers also included an emotion scale (PANAS, 1988, 2007) to conduct an examination of 83 college students’ responses to a “storytelling cue” prompt about a time when a new engineering graduate stepped away from their CEO role within their founded company. Measures in two parts are reported. Stories written by the participants are coded for the presence or absence of specific moti...
In the knowledge-based society, the legacy education system does not provide the needed skills fo... more In the knowledge-based society, the legacy education system does not provide the needed skills for creative engineers especially enhancing student innovation and entrepreneurship capacity. Triple-h ...
ABSTRACT Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving... more ABSTRACT Success in complex and holistic engineering practices requires more than problem-solving abilities and technical competencies. Engineering education must offer proficient technical competences and also train engineers to think and act ethically. A technical ‘engineering-like’ focus and demand have made educators and students overlook the importance of ethical awareness and transversal competences. Using two Finnish surveys, conducted in 2014 and 2016, we examine how engineers perceive working life needs regarding ethics. The data consider different age groups. We research whether an engineer’s age affects their perception of the importance of ethics in their work and if there are differences between young experts and young managers in their use of ethics within work. The results indicate that practising engineers do not consider ethical issues important in their work. This especially applies to younger engineers; the older an engineer, the more important they consider ethics. No statistically significant difference was found between young engineering experts and managers.
Lecturer, previously visiting Professor, in the School of Engineering, in the Mechanical Engineer... more Lecturer, previously visiting Professor, in the School of Engineering, in the Mechanical Engineering Design Group, makes it possible for teams to find unmet user needs using her proven methods-from a socio-cognitive psychology, art and applied design thinking perspective-that she has developed and refined over the past few decades. In addition, she teaches some of these methods to engineering, design, business, and law students. Barbara uses applied psychology and art in her storytelling methods, to help students and leaders traverse across the iterative stages of a projects-from the early, inspirational stages to reality. Founder of the Design Entrepreneuring Studio, she is the author of,"Working Connection: The Relational Art of Leadership;" "Entrepreneurial Leadership: A Balancing Act in Engineering and Science;" and "Designing for Social Participation in the Virtual Universe." With her students in ME 378, she co-authored, "The Power of First Moments in Entrepreneurial Storytelling." Barbara makes productive partnerships with industry and creates collaborative teams with members from the areas of engineering, design, psychology and communication. Her recent work examines perceived differences in on-line and off-line lives; and ways to generate creative work environments. She also bridges the intersection of Silicon Valley and Hollywood in a leadership initiative.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2015
This paper offers blueprints for and reports upon three years experience from teaching the univer... more This paper offers blueprints for and reports upon three years experience from teaching the university course "Lean Software Startup" for information technology and economics students. The course aims to give a learning experience on ideation/innovation and subsequent product and business development using the lean startup method. The course educates the students in software business, entrepreneurship, teamwork and the lean startup method. The paper describes the pedagogical design and practical implementation of the course in sufficient detail to serve as an example of how entrepreneurship and business issues can be integrated into a software engineering curriculum. The course is evaluated through learning diaries and a questionnaire, as well as the primary teacher's learnings in the three course instances. We also examine the course in the context of CDIO and show its connection points to this broader engineering education framework. Finally we discuss the challenges and opportunities of engaging students with different backgrounds in a hands-on entrepreneurial software business course.
2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings
is a Ph.D. candidate in computational mechanics and biomechanics at Stanford University. Her rese... more is a Ph.D. candidate in computational mechanics and biomechanics at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the finite element and continuum mechanics modeling of the airways in chronic lung disease. She is involved in engineering education through Stanford Design School's educating young STEM thinkers course series and prominently through leading I-Cubed: Inspectors, Inquirers, Inventors!, a non-profit startup summer camp for underrepresented student groups to gain exposure to STEM. Mona is dedicated to educating the next generation of engineers.
ABSTRACT Multiple disciplines approach, which includes interdisciplinarity, has been discussed in... more ABSTRACT Multiple disciplines approach, which includes interdisciplinarity, has been discussed in the engineering education context from the early 21st Century [1]. There is very little disagreement about its importance for the engineers. The key question has been how? How to implement theory into practice both in the curriculum and in the actual learning enhancement phase? Both Problem-based learning [2] and CDIO framework [1] are constructivist learning approaches [3] that emphasize these issues. In this paper, we discuss and elaborate some of the learning results of two interdisciplinary master's level student teams that were structurally organized as Capstone project courses [4]. The course projects had ill-defined and openended problem setting. The coaching for students was organized from the departments of Information Technology and Nursing Science at University of Turku. Students that participated in the project represented 3 higher education institutions and 8 disciplines. The disciplines were nursing science, engineering, sustainable development, computer science, social science, educational science, business and administration as well as futures studies. Altogether there were fifteen (15) students from two (2) different nationalities in this study. The results show that in a teamwork and problem oriented and project based setting [5] the learning of professional skills of the students can be enhanced both at the team and the individual level. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary learning happens inside the teams and it depends on the time used, structure of the facilitation process and the general team dynamics. This is, however, not always the case and the possible reasons for this will be discussed.
This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Deve... more This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to...
Product development and front-end project management with an emphasis on learning-by doing educat... more Product development and front-end project management with an emphasis on learning-by doing educational philosophy is seen as one possible answer for closing the gap between industry expectations for graduate’s working life skills and the actual learning enhancement provided by the academia. The question is not so much why, nor it is what. For these we have had an abundance of answers since early 1960’s. The question is how? How to implement hands-on doing focusing on relevant working life skills such as project working capabilities in a teamwork setting, design thinking and communication skills, in addition to the actual disciplinary knowledge. This paper reports preliminary results from a work-in-progress study that analyses the course structure, teaching philosophy and learning outcomes of a course that aims to provide relevant product development, team– based project working and project management skills in an open-ended environment to students. The key research question was what...
The need for creative engineers using natural sciences as their approach has not drastically chan... more The need for creative engineers using natural sciences as their approach has not drastically changed in the past 100 years. However, technology advances have created new challenges and brought new ...
Engineering education in the department of Information Technology at the University of Turku, Fin... more Engineering education in the department of Information Technology at the University of Turku, Finland, follows the CDIO framework. In this paper, we examine the first evolution of the Introduction to Engineering course. The course is based on the CDIO standard no. 4, and it is the very first course for the engineering students when they commence their studies. The background and structure for the course as well as its intended learning outcomes will be presented. Key research questions are how the students and the teaching team have understood the course’s learning outcomes, and how the teaching team has been able to adopt the learning outcomes into the course structure. The research material has been gathered from the two consecutive courses during December 2012 – December 2013. The research material comprises of study journals and feedback that was collected after the course. The questions used in both surveys and study journals were based on intended learning outcomes and partly ...
Changing from a traditional classroom and lecture-based teaching mode to a CDIO-based engineering... more Changing from a traditional classroom and lecture-based teaching mode to a CDIO-based engineering education is not easy for either teachers or students, especially in a doubledegree setting combining different kinds of cultural approaches. In this paper, we examined how students in a Double Master’s Degree Programme between University of Turku, Finland and Fudan University, China adjusted to the change from traditional classroom lecturing to a coached peer-to-peer teaching. The change was supported by a teaching team and catalyzed with hands-on practices in a specifically designed intensive two-week Capstone introductory course - Capstone Bootcamp, which included one-week theoretical preparation and one-week hands-on workshop employing integrated learning and active learning. The course aimed to eliminate students’ confusion about ―Capstone‖, get them aligned in a new environment, and help them quickly find their roles when doing a Capstone project in the coming autumn semester with...
All material supplied via Aaltodoc is protected by copyright and other intellectual property righ... more All material supplied via Aaltodoc is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user.
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
This work-in-progress study reports the first findings from an engineering curriculum design proc... more This work-in-progress study reports the first findings from an engineering curriculum design process in an East African context. The design of new programs and teaching practices involves three universities with local faculty designing a new engineering curriculum with external experts involved in the design process. Innovation is something that in addition to societies and industries also the global academia is striving towards, and not only in research but more and more so also in education [1]. The big question, however, is how to achieve this and how to make innovation happen inside the classroom when the faculty needs to push the boundaries of science while at the same time being transformative educators [2]. And all this in a global higher education environment, where well-established institutions are in the cross pressure of neoliberal worldview and the humboldtian ideal of the community of scholars [neoliberal]. On the other end innovation and creativity are argued to be pro...
The future of learning is being revolutionized by challenge based learning (CBL), where academia ... more The future of learning is being revolutionized by challenge based learning (CBL), where academia offers solutions to reallife challenges. Unfortunately, in developing countries academia overlook the importance of involving stakeholders whoare the prospective owners of the solutions developed. This is because of the weak link between academic institutions andindustry in research and development activities. However, to solve real life challenges faced by the society the researchersneed to work closely and continuously with the targeted community for them to get the sense of ownership and for thesolutions to take into account all relevant factors. This paper presents the impacts realized when eight stakeholders werefully involved from identification to developing solutions of the challenges facing the electrical power sector in Tanzaniawhich is wholly managed by a public utility company TANESCO from generation to distribution. Challenge based coursesintroducedin taught PhD and MScprogr...
This paper presents the results from train-the-trainer workshop held for Tanzanian university fac... more This paper presents the results from train-the-trainer workshop held for Tanzanian university faculty from four different universities. The aim of the workshop was to build entrepreneurial education capacity and competencies of local faculty. Findings from the workshop were planned to be integrated into the existing curricula of the universities together with activating and student-centred teaching methods. Main approaches were Problem based Learning and Design thinking.
When prompted to imagine the story of today’s top engineering graduate, one might imagine a succe... more When prompted to imagine the story of today’s top engineering graduate, one might imagine a successful leader and innovator in this ‘research to practice’ full paper. Changes in the emotional responses of today’s college students pose an intriguing question: can generational differences in emotion suggest a shift in entrepreneurial mind-set and leadership choices post-engineering education? This paper uses modified original protocol developed by Horner (1972) on gendered generalizations of professional success and Engle’s (2003) updated approach for considering responses about occupational choice. The researchers also included an emotion scale (PANAS, 1988, 2007) to conduct an examination of 83 college students’ responses to a “storytelling cue” prompt about a time when a new engineering graduate stepped away from their CEO role within their founded company. Measures in two parts are reported. Stories written by the participants are coded for the presence or absence of specific moti...
In the knowledge-based society, the legacy education system does not provide the needed skills fo... more In the knowledge-based society, the legacy education system does not provide the needed skills for creative engineers especially enhancing student innovation and entrepreneurship capacity. Triple-h ...
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
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