THE CREATION OF CDIO WORKSPACE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND WATER TECHNOLOGY

Fostering active learning and creation of workspaces are central to pedagogic principles in the CDIO initiative. Workspaces are seen as vehicles to create conducive learning environments, which enable a wide range of active and social learning. By creating a common workspace, active learning elements can be effectively infused into modules of the course program. This paper presents the creation of a CDIO workspace at Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering Laboratory for students from the diploma course of Civil Engineering & Management as well as Diploma in Environmental Management and Water Technology at the School of The Architecture and the Built Environment, Singapore Polytechnic. It outlines the present utilization of the workspace, which includes time-tabled teaching and learning, preparation work for projects such as group brainstorming and model building, organization of activities like competition, as well as self learning. Positive acceptance was concluded according to the feedback from both staff and students concerning perceived usefulness and effectiveness in enhancing teaching and learning. Some issues for further development and improvement are also discussed in the conclusions.