READY-TO-WORK ENGINEERS GOAL OF NEW PROGRAM
Brampton, ON – Sheridan College has become a member of the CDIO Initiative – a worldwide movement to restore the balance between teaching ‘practice’ skills and the fundamentals of math and science to engineering students.
September 1, 2013 | By MRO Magazine
Brampton, ON – Sheridan College has become a member of the CDIO Initiative – a worldwide movement to restore the balance between teaching ‘practice’ skills and the fundamentals of math and science to engineering students.
What started as a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and a few Swedish universities in 2001 has gained significant international momentum, with 103 institutions adopting the model. Sheridan is the fifth Canadian institution and the first college in the world to be accepted.
As a new philosophy for engineering education, the framework educates students to Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate (CDIO) complex, value-added engineering products, processes and systems in a modern, team-based, global environment. Rich in project-based, hands-on learning, it aims to produce engineers who are ‘ready to engineer’ when they graduate.
The CDIO syllabus codifies what engineers should know and be able to do when they graduate. Major competencies include disciplinary knowledge and reasoning, personal and professional skills (like experimentation, prioritization, resourcefulness, self-awareness, ethics and integrity), teamwork and communications, and understanding the societal and enterprise context.