Summary

Learning4Society is an education project supported by an Education Fellowship at TU Delft led by Dr. Axelle Viré. The overall goal of the project is to build a framework that will attract a more diverse student population, by creating long-term learning communities between our students and society at large. The specific project goals are outlined as follows.

1. Connect students with teachers, pupils, and society at large (incl. professional engineers) to build longlasting and close-knit learning communities.

2. Train students to a wide range of non-technical skills, including communication to a diverse audience, working in diverse teams, detailed documentation of softwares and designs, open dissemination, and peer-to-peer evaluation.

3. Develop an outreach programme whose content is primarily the outcome of students’ assignments, and which grows every year with new students’ cohorts.

#Importantly, the proposed framework will be impactful across the learning communities. First, the target group (e.g. school pupils and teacher) will be exposed, hands-on, to new technology and learn about the different facets of engineering, with the goal of indirectly challenging biases around engineering studies and attracting minorities to our campus. Second, our university students will undertake innovative assignments, with a new sense of purpose and new skills developed, which will appeal to a more diverse student population. The framework will therefore be able to achieve its overall objective on different time scales, both short and longer term. For the purpose of the Educational Fellowship, the prime target audience will be schools in Delft and Den Haag (both Dutch-speaking and international). However, my vision is to scale-up this project to a wider range of communities, including professionals and the general public, as mentioned in Section 6.