Conferencia ALE
Ximena Vargas asistió a esta conferencia realizada en Monterrey entre en 7 al 10 de junio de 2006. Presentó el trabajo "Designing a first year introduction to engineering course" de los autores X. Vargas y P.Poblete
Abstract
The design of a new course is usually undertaken as a task for professors, where students are not directly involved. Sometimes this strategy causes that the actual workload for students may turn out to be much higher or lower than planned. This article presents the results of a first prototype course designed to test how will first year engineering students react to a planned new projects-based course on Introduction to Engineering. This course will be taken by all incoming engineering students (some six hundred each year) starting in 2007, and a pilot section was offered to some 30 students who volunteered to take part in this experiment.
The addition of this course to the curriculum is part of an effort to improve the quality of engineering education, to allow students to have an early contact with engineering, and to involve them as active participants in the learning process.
The students enrolled in the prototype course worked in teams to accomplish three different projects through one semester. Teams for each project and students roles were assigned by professors after acquiring results of a test of individual students skills and peer evaluation of performance of students in their roles was used as part of the grading.
The first two projects had the same goal for all of the teams: design, construct and operate a Rube Goldberg machine and a solar car, respectively. The framework of this projects included oral presentations and written memos and documents where all the team members had to contribute. Grading was performed through the evaluation of each project activity and a final contest where teams tested their designs.
The third project was selected by each student among alternatives offered by three different professors. The project topics were: solving a congestion problem, redesigning a projectile launcher and dissecting a drill. The activities in this case were decided by each professor and it was the part of the course that was most criticized by students, who complained about the different amount of work demanded by each professor. Also, students grading resulted very different in one of the projects.
The experience of this pilot course was assessed through surveys answered by the actors of the process: students. Results indicate that almost all of them participated enthusiastically in all of the activities and were very satisfied by them, but the time dedicated to successfully finish some of the projects was much higher than expected, in some cases in detriment of other courses that some of them considered much more important.
At the end of the semester professors involved in the course were satisfied that the experiment had been a success, but they were convinced that a second pilot course will be necessary, to try new project topics, and also to have a bigger number of students who will have taken the course, and who will be ideal candidates to become teaching assistants when the new course is offered to the full cohort of entering freshmen next year.
