Grupo de Investigación de
Ingeniería Industrial

The transition toward sustainable production requires engineering and science education to adopt active, interdisciplinary, and practice-oriented teaching strategies. This article presents a comparative analysis of two educational initiatives implemented in Panama aimed at fostering sustainability competencies at the university and secondary school levels. The first initiative, developed at the Technological University of Panama, integrates project-based learning and circular economy principles into an extracurricular module focused on production planning, sustainable design, and quality management. Students created prototypes using recycled HDPE and additive manufacturing technologies within a simulated startup environment. The second initiative, carried out in two public secondary schools, applied project- and challenge-based learning through the Design Thinking framework, supporting teachers and students in addressing real-world sustainability challenges. Both programs emphasize hands-on learning, creativity, and iterative development, embedding environmental awareness and innovation in both formal and informal educational settings. The article identifies key opportunities and challenges in implementing active methodologies for sustainability education. Challenges such as limited infrastructure and rigid schedules were identified, along with lessons learned for future implementation. Students connected local issues to global goals like the SDGs and saw themselves as agents of change. These initiatives offer practical models for advancing sustainability education through innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes production, its integration into manufacturing offers gains in precision, efficiency, and sustainability. Globally, AI supports additive, subtractive, and forming processes through optimization, monitoring, defect detection, and design innovation. In Latin America, however, adoption is limited and uneven, with most evidence from surveys, policy reports, and pilot projects rather than large-scale implementations. This review addresses that gap by examining the global landscape of AI in manufacturing and the specific conditions influencing its adoption in the region. The study is guided by the question: What structural conditions are required to enable successful and sustainable AI integration in Latin American manufacturing? To answer, it applies the Triadic Integration Framework, which identifies three pillars: digital infrastructure, policy and governance, and socio-industrial capacity. The analysis highlights barriers, including fragmented regulation, skills shortages, cybersecurity risks, and cost–benefit uncertainties, while also pointing to opportunities in various industrial sectors. To translate insights into practice, a phased roadmap is proposed, outlining short-term, medium-term, and long-term actions, along with the responsible stakeholders and the necessary resources. As an integrative review, the study synthesizes existing knowledge to build a framework, defining directions for future research, emphasizing that successful adoption requires technical progress, inclusive governance, and regional coordination.

In contemporary engineering education, the conventional subject-focused structure often falls short in fostering the necessary problem- and project-based approaches to build necessary competencies. This paper proposes a five-subject modular concept integrating different departments to develop transdisciplinary skills without compromising on content. It links different modern teaching methods to test their eight students’ interaction potential and productivity. This proposed concept encourages collaborative supervision by professors from diverse higher education centers, challenging students to participate in a semester-long simulation where two groups emulate start-up companies. Tasked with competing in planning, designing and developing a sustainable solution from plastic waste (HDPE), students delve into hands-on experiences, learning how to integrate the requirements and approaches of sustainable production. During the module, knowledge and fundamental skills in the field of engineering were qualitatively measured before and after to compare with the skills learned through the module.