Barcelona School of Civil Engineering launches the "Camins Challenges" program for the 2025-2026 academic year with three challenges in collaboration with companies and institutions on water, structures, and offshore wind energy.
The Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) has launched the institutional project "Learning Galaxy", an initiative that seeks to transform higher education through the use of active and innovative methodologies. One of the pillars of this new model is challenge-based learning (CBL), a pedagogical approach that confronts students with complex, real-world problems to develop practical and creative solutions.
This methodology organizes the learning of one or more subjects around an external challenge. Students work in multidisciplinary teams, in direct collaboration with companies, institutions, and community members, to solve a specific problem in the region. The process involves exploring possible improvements, proposing solutions, implementing them, and finally evaluating their impact.
Camins Challenges: engineering with an impact on the territory
As part of this initiative, Barcelona School of Civil Engineering has launched the Camins Challenges program, designed to bring undergraduate and master's students closer to the professional and social world. The goal is to foster key skills such as complex problem-solving, creativity, teamwork, and collaboration with the external sector.
Each academic year, the program will propose a minimum of three challenges, each linked to essential thematic areas of civil engineering such as structures, ground engineering, water, the environment, transportation, and materials. These challenges will have a strong experimental component and will seek to generate a positive and tangible impact on the region.
The three challenges for the 2025-2026 academic year
For this course, we have already defined the first three challenges that will test the ingenuity and ability of our students:
- Water Games: Promoted in collaboration with Aguas de Barcelona, this challenge will invite participants to find innovative solutions related to water engineering.
- Bridge Competition: A classic challenge in structural engineering in which students must design and build bridge prototypes that meet technical and sustainability requirements.
- Nature-inclusive designs for reconciling offshore renewables with ocean protection (Nid4Ocean): This international university challenge will focus on offshore wind energy and will involve teams proposing designs that are compatible with the generation of offshore energy renewables while protecting ocean ecosystems.
"Camins Challenges" gives us the opportunity to offer more practical and meaningful training, preparing a new generation of engineers with the tools they need to face the social and technological challenges of the future.