Abstract:

The Hydraulics course is included in the second year of the Civil Engineering degree at the Algeciras Technical School of Engineering. The course consists of a theoretical part and a laboratory practice part. The part of laboratory practices is subdivided into 3 main blocks: hydrostatics, pressurized water flow and open channel flow.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to teach practical laboratory classes, which up to that moment were carried out in person. This situation showed the need to develop complementary material to help the student to understand the contents of the subject in a non-face-to-face way. In view of this need, the Hydraulic Engineering Department has carried out a teaching innovation project consisting of complementary material that allows the student to access virtually to the laboratory practices performed during the course. In the first phase, the hydrostatics block has been chosen.

The approach of the project has been to support the classroom practices with the development of explanatory material that is useful not only to the students who cannot attend in person, but to those who do it, allowing them to reinforce the knowledge acquired in the laboratory.

Another benefit obtained is aimed at ERASMUS students, who participate in the course every year, and find difficult to understand the course for language reasons. The material produced can be of significant help for these students. To solve this problem, realization of audiovisual virtual practices was proposed. These videos would include not only the theoretical knowledge difficult to find, but also the complete development of the practice.

The material produced consisted of the digitalization of the practice scripts, their enlargement and conversion to HTML format for their publication in the virtual classroom. Videos explaining step by step how to carry out the practices have also been performed. Moreover, spreadsheet templates were implemented to let the execution with different starting data. All the material has been made available to the students through the virtual classroom.

Finally, a student satisfaction survey has been carried out, to find out the suitability of the project carried out, and to implement improvements to the project.

Keywords:

Fluvial Hidrology, practice scripts, hydrography, civil engineering.