Project summary

The Sprint is an educational Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) project led by an alliance of Laurea, Metropolia and Haaga-Helia Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) with an aim to engage, motivate and prepare students of today for the jobs of tomorrow. The intensive summer school matches students with real projects from businesses, municipalities or third-sector organizations. The multidisciplinary teams follow the Service Innovation process, working to truly understand their user and challenge before developing a solution. Through it they learn about teamwork, open innovation, co-creation and rapid prototyping: Skills that are in high-demand in our changing world.

I worked with the UAS Alliance to understand the value of the Sprint for participants and identify opportunities for enhancing value and helping students achieve their goals, thus putting students at the centre of the learning experience. Through the research, I explored students’ expectations and perception of value in higher education. Looking beyond the concrete skills students want to learn I worked to understand where they want to go and why they’ve picked the Sprint to help them get there. The idea is by helping students make progress towards their goals, the Sprint—and similar educational opportunities—can support a faster and smoother transition to working life and offer increasing value in this ever-changing world.

Throughout the process I worked closely with the Sprint planning team to integrate new insights from research into the design of the upcoming Sprint and onboard new Sprint facilitators. In addition to the final thesis publication, the work was shared with a larger audience of educators through two collaborative papers published in the Journal of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences and presented at a CDIO engineering education conference in Japan.

Project links and publications