From the audience to the stage

How can future engineers prepare for technologies that keep changing and cannot be contained within a fixed syllabus? How can students take an active role in choosing, exploring and sharing that knowledge?

In SISTCA, the challenge was to create a setting in which learning a new technology meant more than receiving information or following instructions. Students needed to investigate, experiment, make decisions and communicate what they discovered.

The response was to invite them to change roles: alongside learning for themselves, they would prepare materials to help others learn. One cohort's work could then help renew the experience of future cohorts, with guidance and review from the teaching team.

The practice aims to help students:

• Investigate and experiment with emerging paradigms and technologies in computing systems, including topics not covered in earlier courses.
• Relate the requirements of a real problem to the functional and non-functional properties of technological solutions.
• Develop a working prototype as part of a team.
• Analyse, synthesise and document engineering work in a guide that supports other students' learning.
• Clearly communicate a technology's relevance, the project's contributions and its potential uses.
• Learn independently, collaborate and reflect critically on their own performance.

The central idea is learning in order to teach. Preparing an explanation, an example or an exercise for someone else requires students to deepen their knowledge, organise their reasoning and anticipate difficulties that may go unnoticed when studying only for their own use.

The practice combines this responsibility with project work and guided experimentation. Students have the freedom to propose a technology and build a solution, supported by supervision in practical classes. Alongside this, they work through shared laboratory guides that provide a structured basis for exploration.

The curriculum is renewed through the connection between authorship and reuse. Projects from one edition produce materials that lecturers select, review and may incorporate into later editions. Seminars with specialists introduce current problems and technologies. Updating the course is therefore an ongoing contribution from students, lecturers and invited professionals.

1. Connect the course with current engineering practice. The theoretical component includes weekly seminars with national and international specialists selected around emerging topics. Sessions last approximately 90 minutes and combine a presentation with discussion. They take place in English when the speaker is from abroad or international students are present.

2. Investigate a technology chosen by the team. In practical and laboratory classes, students form groups and propose a topic they want to learn about. With guidance from their lecturer, they work on it throughout the semester and build a functional prototype demonstrating the technology.

3. Turn the project into a learning experience for others. Each team presents its report as a laboratory guide. The aim is for another student to understand the topic, set up a working environment, explore its functionality and complete exercises with the support of that resource.

4. Present and make the case for the work. At the end of the semester, teams deliver a short presentation of around five minutes in a plenary session. They explain the topic's relevance, summarise their main contributions and show why their work could be useful to a future cohort.

5. Learn from earlier cohorts. All students also complete a shared set of laboratory guides, mainly created in previous course editions. Lecturers select, validate and review these resources, reassessing the collection each academic year. Today's projects can therefore become tomorrow's practical learning activities.

Learning becomes visible through three complementary outputs: the working prototype, the laboratory guide and the final presentation.

• The prototype provides evidence of how the team applies its knowledge and carries out engineering work.
• The guide demonstrates the ability to analyse, organise and explain a technology so that someone else can learn to use it.
• The presentation makes synthesis, communication and the ability to justify the work's relevance and contributions observable.

Independent completion of the shared guides also provides evidence of students' work. Comparing their work with other teams' outputs and preparing the presentation encourages reflection on their own performance.

Supervision in practical classes connects these outputs with each team's investigation and development process. Selecting guides for later years gives the work a concrete purpose beyond its completion during the semester.

The practice began on a small scale: 5 students in 2017/2018 and 25 in 2018/2019. These first editions provided an opportunity to experiment and refine the approach. The course grew to 125 students in 2019/2020 and enrolled 147 in 2023/2024, showing that the experience continued with larger cohorts.

A particularly meaningful outcome is the reuse of student-created materials. The Introduction to Python guide, started in the first edition, was improved by Erasmus students, reviewed by lecturers and remained part of the laboratory activities in 2023/2024. The authors report that the quality of the work produced made it challenging to select a small set of guides for each new edition.

In the Telecommunications and Informatics Engineering programme, where SISTCA is optional, 90% of students chose the course in 2022/2023 and 92% in 2023/2024. These figures indicate demand for the option; they are not pass rates or direct measures of learning gains.

Lecturers also highlight participation in seminars, the quality of prototypes and presentations, and student feedback. A key organisational lesson is that a curriculum can evolve through students' contributions when creative freedom is supported by supervision, selection criteria and pedagogical review.

The approach can begin with a single course activity rather than requiring a redesign of the whole semester.

• Give students a meaningful choice. Let them propose a topic or tool within the learning objectives and available resources.
• Give the work an audience. Ask for a resource that someone else can use to learn, rather than a report intended only for the lecturer.
• Define complementary outputs. Combine a practical application, a guide and a short presentation to develop technical, documentation and communication skills.
• Combine autonomy with support. Provide regular guidance and structured activities that help students gain confidence to investigate independently.
• Allow time for review. Select and test materials before reusing them, correcting problems and updating technologies, examples and instructions.
• Retain authorship and version history. Identify contributions from students and lecturers so that improvements made across successive cohorts are recognised.

The essential cycle is to learn, build, explain, review and reuse. The project's scale and the degree of freedom can be adapted to the cohort's experience.

The practice uses laboratory guides, prototypes, code examples, exercises with solutions, demonstration videos and short presentations. Examples include:

• Introduction to Python: a guide started in 2018 and improved through several versions, covering programming concepts, examples, exercises and solutions. It illustrates continuity between cohorts and review by the teaching team.
• An Introduction to Postman: a team project from 2023/2024 on API development and testing, with examples, exercises and student-produced videos. This is an example of the team's original work before pedagogical review by lecturers.
• SISTCA Game: a prototype created by students to explore the Construct game engine, illustrating one possible form of the project's practical output.

The links below provide access to the Postman code examples and exercises, a video demonstration and the game. Adapting the practice also benefits from a shared guide template, presentation guidance and a version history for the materials.