Abstract:

Corrosion is directly supported by chemical principles. Engineering students have a lack of knowledge is both topics, mostly because these knowledge areas, especially corrosion, are not given priority in pre-college studies. However, corrosion is an issue that Marine and Maritime engineering students will encounter during their professional careers, and must therefore have a solid base of knowledge about it. In order to achieve it, this paper presents the methodology approach that is taken in University of Cantabria, Spain, to teach and learn corrosion in a mandatory course that marine and maritime engineering students must participate in, taking into consideration its particular importance in their current and future work environment. The aforementioned methodological approach consists in using a combination of participative lectures with a variety of active methodologies, such as, in-situ diagnosis of corroded components, which has shown previously offers very good results [1,2], problem solving, laboratory practices, a guided visit to a shipyard and an oral presentation.

In order to evaluate the experience, the authors designed a short and clear survey to collect students’ opinions about the different methodologies used, pursuing to identify which strategy is perceive to create most meaningful learnings about corrosion. Main conclusion reveal that students recognized a significant improvement in their ability to identify corroded components, being “in situ observation” the most effective methodology, followed by the oral presentation and laboratory practices. Although they were also valued positively lectures, problem solving and the guided visit to the shipyard were not identified as fosterers of significative. Moreover, students established a key point related to give attention to corrosion issues before and after the course. Overall, the experience gave promising results and insightful information for the future editions of the course.

References:
[1] M. V. Biezma and S. B. Faldini, “The way to teaching corrosion based on visual inspection: student's opinion” in Eurocorr 2014, pp.223, 2014.
[2] M.V. Biezma, P. Linhardt and C. Berlanga, (2019),”Teaching methods outside the classroom: student´s experience”, in 11th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, EDULEARN 2019, pp. 10391-10395, 2019.

Keywords:

Corrosion, learning strategy, teaching-student interaction, performance.