To make the teaching more effective and, therefore, to facilitate student comprehension, various Innovative Education (D.I., Didattica Innovativa) activities have been activated in several courses of the Laurea Magistrale in Electronics Engineering (i.e. at the M.S.E.E.) at POLIMI. Such D.I. actions are divided into two different types, Action 1 and Action 2.

Action 1 activities are curricular, i.e. they appear in the Study Plan, provide credits, require a final evaluation, and may consist of:

• SOFT SKILL courses with a strong cross-sectional content (social skills, communication skills, self-control and self-esteem, team work, ethics, humanities, etc.);
• innovative teaching and learning approaches, such as BLENDED-LEARNING (flexible teaching, a part carried out during class and another turn online, to give immediate feedback to teachers and students) and FLIPPED-CLASS (the teacher indicates a topic to students, who study it at home, then back to the classroom students discuss it in small groups, together with teacher or peers), in order to make the student more responsible, facilitate collaboration between peers and improve relationship with teachers;
• JOINT ACTIVITIES with companies, research institutions, enterprises;
• multimedia MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses, www.pok.polimi.it) that student watch and study in total autonomy, then they go back to the classroom to put into practice what they learned.

Action 2 activities are extra-curricular, i.e. they do not provide credits, but are in any case traceable in student’s career, since they appear in the “Diploma Supplement” (also known as “Transcript of Records”), delivered together with the Degree to the student. They aim at enhancing students’ interests and attitudes, their aggregation and friendly competition, and may consist of:

• KICK-STARTED WORKSHOPs on “tools of trade” (such as instrumentation, simulation and modelling, CAD software, etc.), but also business games, meetings among young students and entrepreneurs, intellectual property and patentability issues, etc., which provide specific skills to students coming from any Study Programme;
• PROJECTs to train students to put skills into practice;
• CONTESTs between students and together with companies.

As shown in the “Guidelines” for the Laurea Magistrale in Electronics Engineering, seven courses offer a total of 12 credits of D.I. Action 1; these are labelled as “d.i.” in the tables and with the number of credits out of the total credits assigned to the course.

In the next academic years, other D.I. activities, both for Action 1 and Action 2, will be activated and proposed, to allow students to acquire further “soft skills“, in addition to technological and scientific knowledge, aimed at improving both public speaking and interactive presentation of achieved results (e.g., about progress of on-going research or projects), management skills, team building and effective teamwork interactions.