An Example of How Agile Project Work Could Be Implemented in the Interdisciplinary Fields of Engineering

Gathering experience in project-based learning environments is very important for students of almost all subjects, but especially for engineering students, who will mostly work in teams with team members who are likely to come from different fields. The Department of Engineering and Communication at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences (HBRS) in Germany provides a project-based learning environment in the form of so-called “project weeks”. Three weeks of each semester are dedicated to real-life projects in addition to the normal lectures [1]. Besides the experience of working in a project-based environment, it is important to expose students to new ideas of how to work as a successful team. Agile methods [2] such as New Work (freedom and independence), DevOps (wanting to do a good job, trying to understand other team members, wanting to learn new things, wanting to try something new) and Scrum (sprint planning, daily Scrum, using Kanban board and burn down chart) were used in interdisciplinary projects combining two different fields: Materials Science and Computer Science. This paper aims to start a discussion on how to apply and teach agile methods and new work ideas to engineering students. So far, the authors do not have enough data and experience to feel able to choose a specific method for measuring learning outcomes.