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Main Menu Session 2793

Cooperative Teaching Exploring a Multidisciplinary Engineering Problem

José Couto Marques, Teresa Restivo, Pedro Portela, Ricardo Teixeira

Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal

Abstract

The simple case study presented constitutes an illustrative example of how surprisingly rich an open-ended experimental problem may prove to be. This has involved an instrumented soft drink can and a PC as the starting point for a fruitful multidisciplinary investigation that ended up bringing together manpower and know-how from various engineering areas in a very rewarding cooperative teaching and learning exercise.

Introduction

The increasing specialisation of modern engineering curricula may contribute to an excessive fragmentation of teaching subjects, which hinders the formation of a global picture in the student’s mind.

In the course of their basic experimental training, engineering students are, very routinely, supposed to achieve confirmatory results of simple physical laws or effects. The current availability of icon-based user-friendly graphical software for monitoring, control, data acquisition and interpretation, has provided students with an excellent training facility, which is intuitive, open, interactive and flexible 1. In our opinion the exploration of this kind of tool in experimental engineering education can foster student creativity, turning passive observers into active participants and promoting a deeper understanding of the underlying physical and mathematical concepts, in line with Kolb’s theory of experiential learning 2.

We strongly believe that the use of carefully selected interdisciplinary problems has an extremely important role to play in helping to integrate knowledge from distinct engineering fields, with the added benefit of providing excellent opportunities for a cooperative learning/teaching/research practice, which can be highly motivating, creative and stimulating for both students and teachers.

The starting point – a familiar object

"Instrumentation for Measurement" is a 3rd year, 2nd semester, discipline of the 5-year degree course in Mechanical Engineering, run at FEUP under the responsibility of the second author (TR), in which around 60% of the time is devoted to "hands on" laboratory activity involving over 140 students. In order to comply with the demands for a non-conventional final project topic coming from a highly dynamic group of students led by the third author (PP), an open experimental problem was devised (by TR) using a very familiar object – a beverage can.

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Teixeira, R., & Portela, P., & Restivo, M., & Marques, J. (2002, June), Cooperative Teaching Exploring A Multidisciplinary Engineering Problem Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10673