Abstract:

For almost a decade now, it has been observed that the traditional way of teaching in university courses has been moving towards the application of active methodologies that place students at the centre of the teaching-learning process. These types of teaching tools are already widely used in primary and secondary education, including systems such as PBL "project-based learning", service learning or gamification in teaching learning guides. However, although some of these techniques are now being put into practice in higher education, the age gap between teachers and students means that this effort to update is still unproductive in many situations.

Today's students come from a generation that is increasingly self-taught, and the emergence and implementation of social media and content creation means that they can learn autonomously. In this way, they tend to show more interest in certain subjects that use ICT in the classroom. This means that, given the high relevance of acquiring skills and assimilating larger amounts of information, they prefer the process of teaching through experimentation.

In this context, inquiry-based learning, which is the methodology in which students improve this level of competences through the direct application of the scientific method, is postulated as one of the most appropriate methodologies to achieve results adapted to the current reality of the professional world.

This paper presents a teaching practice based on the application of the RBL methodology with engineering students. This experience consists of the elaboration of a model of a modular house by the students, with different possible configurations of size, orientation, and finishes, in which the parameters of comfort and energy efficiency required by the regulations can be measured and configured. On the one hand, to approach and deepen in the concepts of building monitoring, as well as to complement with the understanding of different configurations of enclosures, partitions, and possible orientations for a dwelling. On the other hand, it favours the development of the skills of synthesis and analysis of the information gathered through experimentation to establish sustainable, effective design criteria based on the experimentation itself.

The experience presented in this work has a high degree of acceptance among students, as it allows university students to carry out an exercise that is strongly related and linked to the future performance of their professional activity. This translates directly into significant learning, which means a greater degree of rooting of the concepts worked on in the students and, therefore, greater success in the teaching process. In addition, this paper presents the guidelines followed to implement the RBL methodology in the classroom, as well as the evaluation systems used, and the timing used to implement this proposal. In this way, the aim is to provide other university lecturers with an example of a real, viable and significant application of RBL that can be adapted to technical degrees.

Keywords:

Research-Based Learning, Monitoring, Building Engineering, Educational innovation.