The European Project Semester at ISEP: the challenge of educating global engineers

Current engineering education challenges require approaches that promote scientific, technical, design and complementary skills while fostering autonomy, innovation and responsibility. The European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) (EPS@ISEP) is a one semester project-based learning programme (30 European Credit Transfer Units (ECTU)) for engineering students from diverse scientific backgrounds and nationalities that intends to address these goals. The students, organised in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, are challenged to solve real multidisciplinary problems during one semester. The EPS package, although on project development (20 ECTU), includes a series of complementary seminars aimed at fostering soft, project-related and engineering transversal skills (10 ECTU). Hence, the students enrolled in this programme improve their transversal skills and learn, together and with the team of supervisors, subjects distinct from their core training. This paper presents the structure, implementation and results of the EPS@ISEP that was created in 2011 to apply the best engineering practices and promote internationalisation and engineering education innovation at ISEP.     

Adaptive SMC based on the dynamic containment of the sliding variable

Conventional Sliding Mode Controllers (SMCs) exhibit a robust performance against matched bounded uncertainties and disturbances by containing them under a fixed controller’s effort. Consequently, the controller is commonly found excessive, leading to chattering and straining the actuator. As a solution, the variable-gain SMCs adapt to the instantaneous system requirements, thus attenuating the aforesaid effects and keeping the SMC’s benefits. However, the reported adaptive laws underlying such behavior commonly require arbitrary design considerations and do not consider practical implementation. Unlikely, in this work, a hysteresis-based adaptability law to drive the sliding variable to a boundary layer around zero is proposed. The sliding boundary—hysteresis’ width—will consistently “bounce” over the sliding variable, trying to shrink against it while preserving the sliding mode. This behavior finds its steady-state once the sliding variable and the sliding boundary’s dynamics are synchronized, with no need of subjective or arbitrary adjustments. The close-loop tuning can be derived from the system’s parameters alone, and its steady-state performance can be quantitatively predicted. Furthermore, a method to adjust the sliding surface parameters according to the system’s desired behavior is provided, all in a closed, analytical way. Finally, the physical actuator limits are taken into account and never exceeded, and the discrete nature of the devices normally used for SMC implementation is incorporated throughout. Two examples are studied to portray the proposal’s advantages.     

Technology as culture and embodied knowledge

An operational definition for knowledge is presented and, invoking the economic concept of a transformation process, a definition of technology emerges as a static form of knowledge embodied within a functional piece of some material form. The knowledge of a social group, or of the human kind, is then observable, at a certain moment in time, in its technological forms. In this sense, technology is the visible part of its culture. Microeconomic and macroeconomic views, as well as management understanding of what it is and which role technology plays, are also considered and discussed.     

A practice-oriented professional development programme to support the introduction of a new mathematics curriculum in Portugal

This article presents the extended workshop, a national professional development programme that was used in the preparatory stages of the introduction of a new mathematics curriculum for basic education (grades 1–9) in Portugal. These workshops are based on five major ideas—orientation towards practice, focus on students’ learning, collaboration, practitioner research, and change of professional culture. The evaluation shows that these workshops constituted a stimulating professional development setting that encouraged teachers to reflect about classroom practice and students’ learning and was quite successful in supporting an overall movement favourable to the orientations of the new curriculum.     

Pre-service teachers and visual arts education. A study based on artistic creation as a way of interrogating reality / Los futuros docentes y la enseñanza de las artes visuales. Un estudio basado en la creación artística como forma de interrogar la realidad

: This study explores pre-service teachers’ knowledge of visual arts education and their ability to undertake creative processes. It is a study conducted with 88 primary school student teachers from a university in southern Spain. The participants were required to produce an artistic piece in which they were asked to reflect their thoughts on visual art education. The resulting pieces served as a tool for inquiry which enabled us to evaluate their theoretical and practical knowledge after performing an analysis of their form and content. After analysing the data, we concluded that future teachers are aware that arts education develops many types of skills, although they are only partially able to carry out a satisfactory artistic creation process. Therefore, it is essential to reinforce the training of pre-service teachers in the domain of artistic processes. Questioning pre-service teachers directly, and doing so through artistic creation, has allowed us to ascertain their level of knowledge of the visual arts.     

Relationship between skeletal muscle contractile properties and power production capacity in female Olympic rugby players

This study aimed to determine which contractile properties measured by tensiomyography (TMG) could better differentiate athletes with high- and low-power values, as well as to analyse the relationship between contractile properties and power production capacity. The contractile properties of the vastus medialis (VM), rectus femoris (RF) and vastus lateralis (VL) of an Olympic women’s Rugby Sevens team (n?=?14) were analysed before a Wingate test in which their peak power output (PPO) was determined. Athletes were then divided into a high-power (HP) and a low-power (LP) group. HP presented an almost certainly higher PPO (9.8?±?0.3 vs. 8.9?±?0.4 W kg^?1, ES?=?3.00) than LP, as well as a very likely lower radial displacement (3.39?±?1.16 vs. 5.65?±?1.50?mm, ES?=?1.68) and velocity of deformation (0.08?±?0.02 vs. 0.13?±?0.03 mm ms^?1, ES?=?1.87) of the VL. A likely lower time of delay was observed in HP for all analysed muscles (ES?>?0.60). PPO was very largely related to the radial displacement (r?=??0.75, 90% CI?=??0.90 to ?0.44) and velocity of deformation (r?=??0.70, 90% CI?=??0.87 to ?0.34) of the VL. A large correlation was found between PPO and the time of delay of the VL (r?=??0.61, 90% CI?=??0.84 to ?0.22). No correlations were found for the contractile properties of RF or VM. These results highlight the importance of VL contractile properties (but not so much those of RF and VM) for maximal power production and suggest TMG as a practical technique for its evaluation.