Abstract:

All engineering degrees offered at the University of Oviedo share the first term of the first year. Among the subjects taught in this term, Computer Basis (CB) mainly focuses on the introduction to logic and information representation, database design, and an introduction to programming. Other aspects, such as hardware, operating systems and utility software are studied as well.

The fact of sharing the first term allows the students to move from one degree to another within the University of Oviedo with some subjects automatically validated. However, this also means that the affinity of the students with the subjects varies according to the case. To cope with this problem, the teaching staff (TS) of CB, composed of approximately 50 members of the Computer Science Department, explored different strategies. One of them was to meet and discuss the singularities of CB in the existing degrees with the main aim of defining innovative proposals to apply in the different cases. That was the case of FINEXT 2019, a strategy to discover the weakness of CB and propose different solutions to tackle them.

FINEXT is an initiative founded in 2018 to promote the collaboration between the different members of the TS involved in the subject. Using Well-Sorted, a collaborative online tool to arrange meetings, the TS first answered two questions, then grouped all the answers, and finally discussed the results in a workshop. The most relevant issues detected in this workshop were the students’ lack of motivation to study CB, the skills of the students with respect to Physics or Math, the reduced students’ autonomous learning, and the time restrictions to teach the contents of the subject.

During the FINEXT 2019’s workshop, several ideas arose to cope with these issues, such as leaving part of the subject as homework. Besides, some content could be taught as a workshop, e.g., setting up and running a Raspberry Pi to teach hardware and operating systems. Moreover, using alternative CB tools was found interesting, e.g., moving from MS Access to SQLStudio. Finally, merging the contents of different parts, such as using the De Morgan’s Laws when learning Python operators and conditionals, could lead to learning some concepts by using them. Once these findings were extracted, the idea was to implement some of them during the following year.

FINEXT 2020 is a teaching innovation project granted by the University of Oviedo. The main aim of this 2020 call is a bit different from the one of the previous edition. In this regard, no more questions concerning the difficulties in the CB’s teaching were asked. Instead, only innovative ideas to develop through teaching innovation projects were requested. Moreover, FINEXT 2020 introduced a formative session specially designed to new staff members of the department, so they could learn about some of the administrative aspects, and also to introduce them to teaching innovation. This study focuses on the results of this new release of FINEXT and the main ideas regarding teaching innovation projects to cope in the short-term future.

Results from this experience show that, on the one hand, the introductory seminars were found very useful by the attendees, giving them a global overview of the procedures and taking note of the suggestions made. On the other hand, several clear innovative actions were proposed in the workshop and it is expected that some of them can be presented as teaching innovation projects in the near future.

Keywords:

Higher Education Area, The Bologna Declaration and ECTS Experiences, Research Methodologies.