The Center

The main aim of the D-ITET Center for Project-Based Learning is to build its activities at the department level with a centralized structure. The center will primarily focus on creating, promoting and providing education and courses with projects and hands-on practice for Bachelor's students. However the center will provide also projects for Master's students. The center is also proposing P&S courses that will improve the hand-on experience of Bachelor's students and they will give the bases for semester and master project the students will face in the Master's program.

Four vision areas of the center

Teaching and courses

The center will propose new activities aiming to expose students to real-world challenges while emphasizing teamwork, communication of ideas, self-discovery, student-initiated learning, and creative approaches to problem solving. The center will motivate each D-ITET institute to offer new course that has a practical project or laboratory as students’ exams. Moreover, the center will drive interdisciplinary courses and build the experience to set up new project-based activities.

Projects and interdisciplinary projects

One main goal of the center is to involve students to be engaged in exciting and challenging projects. The center is a “promoter” of projects that are more interdisciplinary and prominent than “standard” projects that each institute alone can propose. The center will help the communication between groups, and the proposal of innovative and exciting projects that eventually involve more Master's students for more than one semester.
At least one flagship project per year will be proposed that will involve 4 to 10+ Bachelor's students in a more complex and competitive project.

Industrial collaboration and internships

The center promote industrial partnerships and internships to have more interesting, realistic, and challenging problems to solve and keep contact with the industrial world. Students engaged in internships can develop vital networks and relationships to support/enable progression, gain industry skills and competencies, engage in meaningful and more in-depth learning activity with specific outputs or products expected (and linked to academic study), and learn from a wide range of highly skilled professionals who mentor, coach and guide.

Awards and public events

The center will propose several public events annually: to meet industry, to ensure public outreach, to share ideas, and to highlight current activities. The main goal is to offer events for industry and other external entities, and also for other ETH groups to engage with D-ITET researchers. The center will also promote design contests, awards, and other activities to challenge the students as well as to increase motivation and competition. The awards will motivate students to generate innovative solutions. Such awards will also be part of the annual events to stimulate novel projects, courses, activities and interaction within the department, ETH and with the industry around us.