HACKTEX MOOC on smart textiles tested on practical experience: a workshop about raw materials for the development of smart textiles

Abstract

Smart textiles have gathered an increasing interest in the industry in recent years. Nevertheless, due to its uneven development and its novelty, the presence of this topic in the educational curricula is scarce and mainly devoted to master's degrees. HACKTEX project, an Erasmus+ project funded by the European Union, aims to develop open-access resources to complement the knowledge of European engineering students’ curricula in the field of smart textiles through different pedagogical tools. In that sense, in the framework of the project, a virtual training based on a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) and a Virtual Guide on Entrepreneurship has been developed. In order to test the produced virtual materials, a pilot bootcamp training was carried out, hosted at the facilities of the University of Borås (Sweden). The bootcamp involved students from all the universities participating in the project: the hosting university (UB), TUIASI (Romania), UNIWA (Greece) and UPC (Spain). Previously to its start, the students accessed the online virtual training and studied the materials available. Then, during the bootcamp, the project partners designed as trainers tested the knowledge from the virtual training acquired by the students with different learning methodologies. The TECTEX Research group from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), was responsible for the first day of the bootcamp training, where a workshop about raw materials and products for functional and smart textiles (corresponding to the learning unit 2 of the MOOC: Raw materials and products for functional and smart textiles) was performed. This workshop started assessing the knowledge of the students about the raw materials presented on the MOOC with an interactive quiz. Then, the students were mixed and grouped to interact with four workstations, each one focussed on one of the raw materials discussed on the MOOC. Through this interaction, the students could experiment and check the material’s properties. After a lunch break, the groups (composed of at least one member from each institution) were asked to develop a product concept based on the raw materials studied. The experience was successful, with five different products conceptualised and presented at the end of the afternoon season. The students, through an anonymous questionnaire, evaluated the workshop and the results were positive, considering the experience useful, since the activity allowed them both deepening on the topic studied and networking with other engineering students from different universities and backgrounds

HACKTEX project was co-funded by the European Union through the grant 2021-1-RO01-KA220HED000027527. The authors also acknowledge the funding of the research group TECTEX (2021 SGR01056) from the Department de Recerca i Universitats de la Generalitat de Catalunya

Postprint (published version)