ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1647082
This article is part of the Research TopicReimagining Higher Education: Responding Proactively to 21st Century Global ShiftsView all 7 articles
Engineering Education on Sustainability and the Reuse of Electronic Components A Novel, Hands-on Educational Method that Emphasizes Student Creativity
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Panepistemio Dytikes Attikes, Egaleo, Greece
- 2Department of Early Childhood Education, Ethniko kai Kapodistriako Panepistemio Athenon, Athens, Greece
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Engineering students are experientially introduced to the concepts of sustainability, recycling and the cyclic economy through a novel educational method proposed, implemented and evaluated within an Electrical and Electronics Engineering undergraduate curriculum. Students work in groups in a hands-on laboratory to disassemble damaged electrical / electronic devices, reclaim electronic components, recycle the damaged ones and reuse the functional ones, either to repair similar devices or to design and construct new devices. Students get a lived experience of a collaborative sustainability project that aims at developing their cognitive, social/emotional and metacognitive skills, creativity being a central one among them. An educational intervention of two phases is implemented and evaluated via multiple tools. Results document student gains of varying degrees across all three domains of learning; an increase in creativity, in particular, is measured between the two phases. The formation of a community of learning is another important outcome that opens directions for future research.
Keywords: sustainability, Recycling, Cyclic economy, Engineering Education, E-waste, Hands-on lab, Creativity measurement, community of learning
Received: 14 Jun 2025; Accepted: 05 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nikoloudakis, Rangoussi, Liarakou and Sinioros. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Maria Rangoussi, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Panepistemio Dytikes Attikes, Egaleo, Greece
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.