oa Bridging the gap between research and engineering education: A case study of the distributed constraints programming research field

Well-prepared human capital in research and development is one of the key pillars that support knowledge and innovation. Therefore, a well-educated engineering workforce is essential to undertake those grand challenges. We note that in our engineering institutions in Morocco, there is a big gap between how engineering is actually taught and the interesting immaterial capital of research knowledge and productivity. Reducing this gap requires global motivation, innovation and collaboration from engineering educators and researchers. However, effective curriculum innovation is required to better respond to new demands of engineering in our economy. One of the most widespread teaching strategies is the promotion of engineering education through research: bringing research into the classroom and involving students in research projects.

Training through research is a fundamental process of transferring knowledge and skills from engineering educators to undergraduates. However, making the correlation between research productivity and teaching activities is not an obvious task. In this paper, we present our fundamental engineering education strategic process for bridging the gap between these elements. A case study is proposed of how we could exploit the results of our research in engineering education. Thanks to the robustness of our approach and the motivation of our students, developing innovative and intelligent multi-agent applications based on distributed constraints reasoning techniques is now possible in our classrooms.