Reply To: Teaching method

[Khalil Stessens]

In our university, the course we teach is divided in two parts:
The first one where we teach them about engineering methods to analyze problems and bring solutions.
The second one they have to find a problem from their local communities that impacts their daily life, analize it through engineering methods and bring up possible solutions. Then they have to compare them based on multiple aspects like social impact, budget and profit it could make, environmental impact and schedule.

We are really proud about the second part because students have to look and solve a real problem applying the theory, going into higher order thinking levels, and its a great starting point as many schools set “Change the world” as a goal, thus making students overlook a lot of small situations that can have a huge impact.

Our problem comes with the first one as it was handled by professors that prefer to stand up in the blackboard and simply talk and dump information through the whole class, so we are starting to evaluate ways to add gamification, rewards and more engagement for those classes to improve their results with everything we learned here.