Victor Freitas de Azeredo Barros

Environmental Engineering Program Preparing Engineers to Tackle New Challenges

The Engineering Education Research Team of COPEC - Science and Education Research Council has designed and is implementing a program for an engineering school which main goal is to offer a PhD program of high quality in order to fulfill the work market demand for a high qualified environmental engineer. It is an interdisciplinary environmental engineering program that intends to offer students an exciting opportunity to focus their technical capabilities on evolving science that affects human quality of life in a global scale and can simultaneously help preserve and restore areas in which they work. Following the world trend educational model of theory and practice, student projects provide unique, hands-on opportunities to explore the multifaceted considerations surrounding environmental engineering problems on local and global levels, and to improve living conditions in the subject areas. It has a curriculum that addresses the time-crunch problem by integrating professional practices into the technical curriculum.

Engineering the engineering program: The year of discovery

Retention is an issue that has been faced by many engineering colleges due to the difficulties and lack of knowledge about what it really is to be an engineer. The first 3 years of the course are particularly intense and hard. A way to overcome this period might be achieved by implementing a new kind of course, more enticing and dynamic. That is the idea of COPECs engineering education research team, to embed a program with a more interesting activity for students in the first year. It is what has been named after “The Year of Discovery”, a short-term workshop in order to show students the possibilities of performing as engineers in a global environment - a project developed for a private university, in order to decrease the retention rate in their engineering programs.

Engineering Challenging Entrepreneurship Practice

The objective of this paper is to describe the engineering program designed by COPEC – Science and Education Research Council’s education research team, in which the so called ‘Working with Communities’ course is included early in the third year of engineering program. It provides students the chance to work as consultants to foster an entrepreneurial community in the city. The idea is to create an Innovative Office, to which local entrepreneurs can resort to in order to discuss and find sustainable solutions for a specific problem or a project. So far, the project has worked relatively well. Student groups are working hard and the results have been positive.

Creating new learning environment to foster enrollment in engineering programs

A discovery adventure! This is the program that has been developed by the Education Research Team of COPEC – Science and Education Research Council – a K12 School program for a city, with the goal of providing better and effective knowledge for young students, especially those who do not think about to enter a University. The main goal is to encourage more bright young minds to pursue careers in engineering or technology, by providing K12 students, from public schools of a municipality, knowledge about science and research methodology in a way that it will remain as a life practice. It fits into the counties’ necessity to improve competitiveness in technology growth, which has implications in workforce development, as well as in science and technology development. The main characteristic of this project is the possibility to apply new and innovative approaches, which provide teenagers students the ability to develop concepts and theories to solve and understand scientific and nonscientific problems and, consequently, find solutions for those problems.

Rethinking engineering education

The Professional of today needs to acquire a dynamic ability to absorb information, adjust to organizational goals, and navigate in a complex work environment. For this reason, a classic approach seems to be more useful for the demands of todays job market. It is at least interesting to notice, that the classic approach is being neglected, at a time when its product might be more interesting than ever. The Engineering Education Team of COPEC — Science and Education Research Council has designed a program that is knowledge centered and specially challenging, which integrates classical engineering approaches and real experience in order to achieve a high level of engineers ready to perform as professionals or researchers. It aims to form the Engineer — a professional that is capable to learn for life and be creative in many ways.

“Innovative office”: Building future for young engineers

This paper shows the course designed by COPEC - Science and Education Research Council education research team, for engineering students what is called “working with communities course”, which provides the students of engineering in 3rd year the chance to work with consultancy for the entrepreneurial community, in the region. It is for an engineering school of a private university and the goal is provide the needed resources to enable interdisciplinary efforts to prepare engineering students to tackle real-world challenges in engineering, entrepreneurship and new business ventures as professionals. The process is designed in order to offer a space that has been named after “innovative office”, where local entrepreneurs go with a problem or project to discuss and to find sustainable solutions under the consultancy of young engineers. So far the program has been working well and is opening doors for young engineers.

Engineering education program promoting the profession

Many Engineering colleges have been facing the retention issue because of difficulties and lack of knowledge about what really means being an engineer. The first 3 years are particularly intense and hard. A possible way to overcome this period is to implement a new kind of course, more enticing and dynamic, which is the idea of COPEC’s engineering education research team, to embed a course with a more interesting activity for students in the first year. Current students have access to multiple ways of learning. They make use of a range of learning sites, both physical and virtual. Currently, students are very smart users of modern technology and are well connected with the online world. They are already international. However, an international experience adds a lot to their reality. It also promotes an early picture of the profession in their minds. So, this program provides students the possibility to perform as engineers in an international environment. It is a project developed for a private university in order to foster the retention rate in their engineering courses.

High quality engineering program achievement

Buildings and bridges are often the first constructions that come to mind, as they are the most visible creations of structural engineering. Civil engineers design roads, railways, subway systems and airports. And there are also less visible designs, just like every time people turn on a water tap waiting for the water to flow, without thinking that civil engineers made it possible. Finally, civil engineers are still of fundamental necessity for the construction of the civilized world. The goal of this paper is to describe a program, specially designed for a private engineering school, whose aim is to become the best one in the region, once there are other universities at the same level competing for students. COPEC – Science and Education Research Council’s Engineering Education Team has designed a new engineering program, knowledge centered and specially challenging, which integrates classical engineering approaches and real experience, in order to achieve a high level of engineers ready to perform as professionals or researchers. It aims to form the Engineer – a professional that is capable to learn for life and be creative in many ways.

Engineering Education: Balancing generalist and specialist formation in technological carriers: A current challenge

The purpose of this paper is to present the new IEEE Education Society Conference in its Region 9, Latin America, the IEEE World Engineering Education Conference - EDUNINE2017. Its first edition is in Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, an important city for its characteristics and History. It is a historical conference that has been designed to happen in the next years, in the different countries of Latin America that encompasses a vast and very diverse area of the world, multicultural and multilingual. It is a unique and innovative congress that brings decision makers, researchers and academics from many countries together, for a lively exchange of ideas and research related to the development and sustainability of Engineering Education quality and related subjects. It offers unparalleled networking opportunities with peers worldwide, keynote speakers, discussing international perspectives on engineering education, not to mention the value resulting from human-to-human connections.

Using Social Media as a Mechanism to Consolidate the Organizational Memory—Insights from the Attention Based View of the Firm Theory

Increasingly, organizations are aware that the knowledge generated in the organization over time is a primary factor to remain competitive in the market. This leads organizations to seek strategies that preserve this knowledge generated over time and create mechanisms to encourage its employees to use part of this accumulated knowledge, in the generation of innovative products and strategies, on solving problems as well as in decision-making. In this potentiating process, the Organizational Memory (OM) comes in the interim as a way of conceptualizing how is this process of creation, storage and dissemination of knowledge in the organization over time and how the knowledge accumulated by members of an organization can influence the actions and decisions, both in the present and the future of the organization. For this development of OM to be effective and harmonious, it is necessary that the attention of individuals to be targeted and aligned, noticing the stimuli from the environment, and directing organizational time and cognitive effort towards the decisions to be made in the organization. In this scenario, in an attempt to improve our understanding of theoretical concepts taking into account the influence of Social Media in organizations, we raise the following question: How Social Media can be used to guide the attention of decision makers towards better creation, storage, dissemination and application of knowledge in the organization? Therefore this research is an important first step to understand the potential of Social Media in the organizational setting as a means of focusing the attention of policy makers on the development of OM. Adopting an interpretative approach to the literature review, the paper provides a discussion of 22 case studies found in the literature that were analyzed using the Attention-Based View of the Firm as a guiding lens. This analysis shows some evidence and relevant implications of the use of Social Media in the organizational context as well as a first theoretical description of how the focus of attention of decision makers influence the development of OM.