Documentation: Eight editions of ETH Week
Break out of the classroom and into the world
ETH Week to be replaced by PBLabs
ETH Week will be discontinued after eight successful editions that connected over 1.200 motivated students with more than 400 inspiring experts from academia, industry, and the public sector.
The format has put a variety of sustainability topics on the agenda and successfully demonstrated the potential of project-based education. Today, expanding project-based education and integrating sustainability themes are key priorities in our educational development. That is in large part thanks to ETH Week.
ETH Week will be replaced by PBLabs (Project-Based Labs). This new strategic initiative aims to enable the expansion of scalable, project-based education within our curricular offer by supporting lecturers throughout the university, who want to implement project-based formats.
Due to a growing student body and budget constraints, the scalability of project-based education increasingly comes into focus. Tackling the challenge of scalability is particularly important because project-based teaching demands more resources compared to traditional frontal lectures. Nevertheless, project-based education is a highly desirable teaching format due to its effectiveness in fostering a broad set of competencies.
We want to thank the people who were instrumental in the conception and implementation. These include Fabio Bargardi, Christine Bratrich, Stefano Brusoni, Lukas Bühler, Alan Cabello, Günther Dissertori, Lino Guzzella, Reto Knutti, BinBin Jiang Pearce, Florian Rittiner, Lex Schaul, Sarah Springman, Andreas Vaterlaus, and many more.
Thank you for your innovative ideas and hard work, which will continue to inspire the educational development at ETH and the activities of PBLabs!
This is not the end. It is the beginning of a new and exciting chapter.
ETH Week was a project-based course during which interdisciplinary groups of students spent one week defining a problem and developing a solution related to sustainable development.
The programme lasted for six action-packed days, with events throughout each day and on most evenings. Every edition tackled a topic related to one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Around 150 students mixed into heterogeneous teams. Each team (approx. eight students per team) had a dedicated coach who guided the group through the fast-paced process.
Students got the chance to attend talks and discussions with inspiring leaders and changemakers, go on field trips throughout the Zurich area, as well as meet and network with 60+ experts at a Knowledge Fair. After gaining this variety of input, each team defined its own problem statement and developed a solution following the design thinking approach. On the last evening, the teams presented their ideas and prototypes in an engaging sketch-style pitch in front of a large audience, which included an expert jury that awarded several prizes.
Whether you want to reminisce old times, or are interested in implementing a similar project, we invite you to explore this page, which documents all eight editions of ETH Week!