The University of British Columbia's campus sustainability office, through the “Social, ecological, and economic development studies” (SEEDS) program, gave a team of students in a bio‐environmental engineering design course an environmental problem to resolve for their term project. The students did not resolve the problem, but the project‐based learning approach was effective in teaching them about social, economic and environmental sustainability issues. It also provided the campus with a new sense of direction concerning the solution to the particular problem. The teaching process required that the instructors change their teaching approaches as well as subject matter. Changes in individual engineering‐related skill levels were difficult to assess and, due to this, corrective actions were undertaken to address team project‐based assessment in the future. The teaching approach can be adapted to other educational settings. This paper will describe the overall learning and teaching process.

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