Attracting Engineering Students to Non-Technical Seminars by Including International Student Competitions Into the Regular Engineering Curriculum

Interdisciplinary, complex projects with real-world characteristics offer students great opportunities to expand their knowledge, especially if it goes beyond their core competencies. For engineers, such projects can be an additional motivation to acquire non-technical competencies and soft skills they can use in their professional lives. In traditional engineering programs, access to such additional knowledge is rarely available, maybe only in supplementary courses which are not part of the regular study program. We have developed a new, customized elective module on cost and production management to close this potential gap. The course is geared towards job-related requirements by adjusting it to an extracurricular global student competition. The theoretical content was purposefully selected to directly apply to closely related real-world problems that students must solve in this competition. Specifically, lectures on cost and production management techniques were self-reliantly prepared and presented to the rest of the course by each participant after prior consultation with peer instructors. The professional docent mainly acted as a mentor and helped give the contents an overall structure and perspective. Thus, the course setting and content allowed engineering students to engage with highly useful non-technical topics in an activating, peer-centered manner. The core element of our teaching approach is that students acquire their knowledge through problem-based learning and engage with the subject matter in an activating way. In this manuscript, we show how participants have perceived our teaching approach and discuss the requirements and opportunities for making it a profound learning experience. We also discuss how the connection to specific technical aspects was used as a means to enhance learning in non-technical courses.