Open Access

Juho Mäkiö, Elena Mäkiö-Marusik, Jolanta Kowal

• CPS−capable engineers of today increasingly need to possess both technical and social skills to run CPS−engineering projects successfully. Having technical skills solely is not enough since engineering projects mostly fail because of lacking knowledge, skills and social competencies of project members. The effective holistic teaching methods can help to solve this problem. The aim of this study was to develop, apply and asses an innovative task−centric holistic agile teaching approach (T−CHAT), for the course in CPS−engineering with realistic up−to−date industry−like scenario. The authors conducted four monthly educational experiment with fifteen−person group of volunteers – international students at technical universities in Germany and Russia, during that the authors used the novel method of teaching. The course participants evaluated the effects of education using a novel original questionnaire, estimating knowledge, skills and social competencies at the beginning and end of the course. Feedback of the experiment was positive for the method. The main findings of our study was the innovative teaching approach. KEY WORDS: Agile teaching; Cyber−Physical Systems; Education of Cyber−Physical Systems Engineering; Education of Global Software Engineering; Perceptional teaching; Problem−based teaching; Project−based teaching; Research−orientated teaching