Developing Complex Problem-Solving Skills: An Engineering Perspective

Abstract

While technical skills remain the core foundation for engineering graduates, professional competencies, including communication, teamwork, and complex problem solving, are increasingly important to succeed in work environments. To enhance the employability of our students, we have integrated several professional skills courses into our “Software Design and Engineering” Master study curriculum, and combined each of them with a technical course. In this paper, we present a blended-learning course design including didactic methods for teaching complex problem solving. The course is intertwined with a lecture on software integration topics, which enables the students to apply their complex problem solving skills on real projects in a domain-specific context.