STUDENT LEARNING ENHANCEMENTS THROUGH PROBLEM BASIC LEARNING (PBL) IN MATERIALS TECHNOLOGY

Material Engineering Technology was known to be a difficult subject by students because of the amount of technical information students have to be familiar with. In this context nowadays, problems are increasingly complex but they do not have clear solutions. Whereas engineers were once employed to build dams and pipelines, now they are employed to manage water resources. This might require demand management, improving efficiency (i.e. infrastructure renewal to reduce leaks, water recycling and reuse, etc.). Moreover, many of the problems are social ones (i.e. attitudes to water reuse) rather than environmental, economic or technical, even though our graduates are expected to be competent at these as well.

In order to solve this it has been decide to convert part of course into PBL-based tutorials. The final draft of the problem encourages students to explore concepts in material technology in an attempt to find plausible solutions to the problem. At the end of the programme, student feedback regarding the effectiveness of the programme was gathered by means of an evaluation form.

This paper summarises the results obtained and the implications of tutor and students to learn through Problem Basic Learning (PBL) in materials engineering technology.