Invited Paper - University of Porto, its Faculty of Engineering and Project Based Learning (PBL) Approaches

The University of Porto (U.Porto) was founded in 19 1 . Its Faculty of Engineering (FEUP) is the largest school of U.Porto. U.Porto and FEUP are very active in research, devel opment and innovation with about 20% of all scientific papers in Portugal among the 15 public Universities in the country. FEUP is also aware of the important role of higher education in training future engineers. U.Porto and FEUP have been following dis cus ions and significant efforts have been made for promoting teacher professional d evelopment in order to guaranty new teaching/learning methodologies and initiatives to promote engineering education. Diverse initiatives came out since 2000. This work describes different projects specially developed at FEUP like the EMPE project and the FEU P project will be described and results will be addressed. Also, a global and huge program from U.Porto, iJUP, will be presented as very unifying interdisciplinary progra m t U.Porto involving together teachers/researchers and students from all its 14 s chools, and particularly from FEUP.