Big global challenges

For the past few years, Politecnico has been stimulating the student community to take on important contemporary challenges, such as issues concerning climate and sustainable development, outside the academic world.

As of A.Y. 2021/22, there is a new curricular course with an evocative name - BIG GLOBAL CHALLENGES - as a compulsory course for all students enrolled in an Engineering programme: six contemporary 'big challenges'. Each challenge is divided into four different directions, for a total of 24 courses of around 150 students each, co-taught by 150 pairs of lecturers, one with a technical background and one from the world of human and social sciences.

The six Big Global Challenges are: Climate, Digital World, Energy, Mobility, Health, Humans and Technology.

After a 'zero' lecture devoted to the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the UN 2030 Agenda (Politecnico is currently leading the Italian network of sustainable universities RUS ) and a lecture by the philosopher of science Telmo Pievani, focusing on the importance of dialogue between knowledge, three hours of general introduction are proposed for each of the six Big Global Challenges.

After that, students take the 24 courses (four for each one of the six challenges) co-taught by a lecturer from a technical background and a humanist-social scientist. The two co-lecturers will provide students with a highly interdisciplinary theoretical introduction to the subject matter. At this point, we then divide into groups for the design of projects that will make it possible to put into practice what has been learnt, always with an interdisciplinary approach.