Collaborative pbl to teach calculus to engineering students: the important role of collaborative professors

• Autores: Gilberto Duarte Cuzzuol, Lílian Barros Pereira Campos, Diana Mesquita, Rui Lima
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 35, no. Extra 5, 2019, págs. 1456-1465
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • eaching Calculus can be one of the most challenging practices in the engineering context for several reasons. It is taught at thebeginning of engineering courses in a critical phase of student transition between high school and university. And most of the time,students are notable to understand the meaning of some contents in relation to Engineering. In the engineering education context,the disciplines of Calculus are responsible for high failure rates and students’ dropout. Besides that, lectures are predominantlyused, with rigid contents centered on the blackboard and in the book. Therefore, students have low interaction with teachers.Besides, students have difficulty building their own knowledge and to understand the importance of mathematical methods andprocedures. However, this paper shows a collaborative project-based learning (CPBL) experience to teach Calculus to engineeringstudents with an important support of capstone courses teachers as collaborative professors. Students were asked to choose aphenomenon of their Engineering area of knowledge and explain why and how it needs integrals and derivatives to be explained.127 students from six engineering courses were involved in the experiment. The students were organized in teams and tutored bycapstone courses faculty. These professors were called collaborative professors. This paper aims to describe the collaborativeprofessors’ interactions with the teams and analyze the outcomes in terms of the perception of learning and development oftransversal competences. The evaluation was based on content analysis of the reports delivered by the students. 100% of the groupsevaluated the experience as positive. The students used adjectives such as ‘‘excellent’’, ‘‘extraordinary’’ to characterize theexperience. In addition, students reported the following learning outcomes: knowledge and understanding; analysis; problem-solving; creativity/originality; communication and presentation; evaluation; planning and organization; interactive and groupcompetences. Some groups reported that, in this project, they used laboratories and created prototypes that they will keep onresearching and developing to take these ideas to the market. Yet, in this experience, the failure rate of this discipline thatpreviously was 95% dropped to 5%.