PREPARING ENGINEERING STUDENTS FOR GLOBALIZATION EXPERIENCES WITH INTERNATIONAL PROJECT TEAMS.

This paper focuses on two main issues: industrial globalization and international student teams working with engineering projects. Globalization makes it necessary to cooperate on an international platform and it is very important to train the engineering students to cooperate and communicate in more than one language, with the students from different cultures and speaking different languages. Our program in Electronics and Information Technology, at the Copenhagen University College of Engineering (IHK), is offered in two languages, in Danish and in English. This is the reason we receive more than 50 students every semester as exchange students from Europe and about 5-10 students from outside Europe. We have also about 50-80 international full degree students. The prerequisites of the international students are usually different from what we experience with Danish students. There is very big variety in "the soft skills", like working in teams, cooperate and interact with other students in a team, communicating in oral and written in English or making presentations. In our program, students work in teams four to five students with projects connected to theoretical courses from the first semester. It is worth to put time and effort at the beginning of the semester to teach students the fundamental skills necessary to complete the project, such that they can show the working model at the end of the semester. In the first part of this article we focus on describing how we introduce the students to team work and project work. In the second part we focus on the fourth semester courses, where the project part is to build the autonomous robot and theoretical part consist of Dynamical Systems, Mathematical Modelling and Control Theory. We conclude with describing the benefits and problems we experienced during the last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]