Abstract:

Material Engineering has traditionally been an important part of an engineer’s training. The Engineering course undergraduate engineering degree play an integral part in combining the learned knowledge and promote problem solving proficiency. Engineers outlines, soft skills and social proficiencies as a key competency in the accreditation framework.

There is currently worldwide interest in improving the quality of engineering education and in some instances governments have intervened to assess the quality of teaching and learning across the spectrum of subjects. Globally, attention is increasingly being paid to the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Higher education teaching is becoming more professionalised with some countries setting up accreditation bodies to ensure competencies. Similarly companies are increasingly pressured by global competition and rapid changes in technology to become more flexible and adaptive.

The quality of student learning is directly although not exclusively related to the quality of teaching. Therefore, the first and most promising way to improve learning is to improve teaching writes. Change is constant and everywhere modern society is characterized by a rapidly expanding base of knowledge and expertise, such that many students can not be expected to be cognisant of all of the knowledge in their chosen area of learning. Whilst trying to incorporate more “human” skills into their knowledge base and professional practice, today’s engineers must also cope with continual technological and organisational change in the workplace. In addition they must cope with the commercial realities of industrial practice in the modern world, as well as the legal consequences of every professional decision they make. The challenge of preparing engineering graduates for a fast changing work environment calls for the development of thinking programmes.

Furthermore the engineering competency standards gives design a significant weight in its evaluation criteria, requiring engineering curriculum to have significant design course experience. Thus engineering material pedagogy including assessment and evaluation strategies are of an increased emphasis for educators.

This paper describes the application of problem based learning in an undergraduate preliminary engineering material course with an emphasis on student learning.

Keywords:

Material Engineering, Problem Based Learning (PBL).