[Hariklia Tsalapatas as student]

Active learning offers significant advantages in terms of knowledge retention and building the capacity of students to apply newly developed skills in the real world. Active learning is a broad term that is used to characterize broad activities, ranging from exploring to collaborating, role playing, visiting sites of interest, or solving problems. Often it involves open ended activities. Active learning helps build critical thinking and motivates students to engage in educational activities. One way to apply active learning is to use simulations of the real world. The use of simulations is particularly useful when physical laboratories or other facilities are not available or when the activity of interest is risky. Simulations allow students to experiment in a safe, virtual environment before engaging in an activity in real life. In this sense, they are a great initial training tool. An example of such a tool is the LEAP environment (http://projectleap.eu) that allow students to experiment with agile and lean design industrial design that helps better address customer needs while containing production costs through clean and standardized processes. The LEAP environment introduces two digital games, one of which demonstrates the benefits of the 5S lean production model while the second demonstrates the deployment of the SCRUM agile design process in broad engineering activities.

[Autor]

Artigos