INTERDISCIPLINARY ACTIVITIES FOR THE ACQUISITION OF GEOMETRICAL COMPETENCES IN ENGINEERING DEGREES

This work is focused on the subjects of “Algebra and Geometry” and “Graphical Expression”, which are two of the basic subjects in the first course of the majority engineering degrees. The aim of this work is to try to correct the difficulty that many students find to relate concepts of these two different subjects. In this sense, interdisciplinary learning activities have been designed in order to improve the learning process, making the students aware of the common topics that they learn in both subjects. The approach of interdisciplinary activities helps in the autonomous learning of the student, making easy its extrapolation to other situations.

The first step of this process has consisted of the consensus of common topics to both subjects, realising that approximately the 25% of the topics is common in them. The common lessons form part of the area called descriptive geometry in the subject of graphical expression, and they belong to the area of affine geometry in the subject of algebra and geometry. The identified common areas have been the following: the lesson related to angles, representation of different type of elements in the 3-dimensional space, relative positions between elements, distances and symmetries. After having accomplished this first step, the next stage has consisted in the design of interdisciplinary activities of learning, the generation of didactic material and the implantation of the collaborative learning methodology.

The overall process has finished doing an evaluation which has been carried out by asking the students about this new experience. The analysis of the project reflects that the methodology used is positive and that it has increased the self-learning capacity of the students, although the self-assessment activities have to be improved.