DIGITAL LIBRARY
PROBLEM – SOLVING IN THERMAL ENGINEERING BASED ON FLIPPED LEARNING METHODOLOGY
University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN18 Proceedings
Publication year: 2018
Pages: 4782-4788
ISBN: 978-84-09-02709-5
ISSN: 2340-1117
doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2018.1187
Conference name: 10th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 2-4 July, 2018
Location: Palma, Spain
Abstract:
One of the main causes of failure of Thermal Engineering students is related to problem-solving. Most of the lecturers consider this is because of the misunderstanding of the Principles of Thermodynamics, their practical application and also their competencies in mathematics. As often happens, when students achieve poor results the lecturers usually think this is not their responsibility. In general, when a student struggles with a new problem, the student tries to find similarities in relation to the problems those were already solved by the lecturer. So the applied teaching methodology has a fundamental role.

ikasTHERM is composed of 12 lecturers in Thermal Engineering from the University of the Basque Country. This research group uses active learning methodologies based on flipped learning using video tutorials developed by themselves and shared on YouTube channel. The students have to watch these videos by themselves. The understanding of the theory from those videos is evaluated by using Socrative, so the lecturers know the strengths and weaknesses of the students in relation to the lesson in order to decide which activity is the most appropriate. These activities are based on guided problem-solving methodology.

The survey carried out at the end of the course and the results of the exam show that the methodology encourages the students to analyze and understand what they are doing, instead of trying to remember how they solved a similar problem.
Keywords:
Guided Problem Solving, Flipped learning, thermal engineering.