A Research Program About a Short-term PBL Approach Based on the SDG

The rapid increase in the world population concentrated in urban areas has created complex problems for cities, namely access to drinking water, sanitation, living, commuter, etc. However, many solutions could be prototyped today aiming to create future cities. It is very important that engineering education face this challenge, mainly in the field of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), where students develop knowledge and skills in a given engineering field while addressing SDG. Project-based learning (PbL) is not new in educating engineers in general, and for sustainable development in particular. In PbL, different type of problems leads to different type of projects solved and developed by a group of students. For example, some narrow problems demanding low technological solutions could be developed by students in the first stages of engineering courses. The Federal Center for Engineering Education in Rio-Brazil has been developing a short-term project experience (PbL) focusing on the SDG in the cities. During 48h the students are faced with SDG problems from urban communities and are challenged to create low-cost solutions. In the end, they should present a pitch for experts from NGOs, government, and corporations. This paper presents a short-term PBL approach for SDG supported by cases developed by the students and concludes with recommendations about a research program, aiming to understand the process and the ways to transform the projects into concrete social innovation actions of sustainability applied to communities.