Project types and industrial collaboration in project-based learning

Project-based learning is important in engineering education as is makes the students test their skills in a real-life setting. We have organised project-based learning for software engineering students since 1991. Already in the early times, the projects were based on collaboration with near-by companies and other customers. This collaboration with external organisations, called customers in this paper, creates strong links between education and surrounding society.

In this paper, we report the experiences from our project courses. Especially we describe 1) how the courses have helped collaboration between students, teachers and companies, 2) the different categories for topics and goals of the projects. Based on the analysis, we outline a new project type, a technology exploration project.