COMBINING ROLE-PLAYING AND PROJECT-BASED LEARNING AS A WAY TO INCREASE MOTIVATION OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS

One of the main challenges in engineering education is to prepare future engineers not only in the acquisition of technical knowledge, but also in the capacitation to work in teams, problem resolution, project presentations and work meetings, among others. Within the framework of the European Higher Education Area, the work of the teachers has increasingly focused on orienting the subjects to the acquisition of adequate skills for the responsible exercise of a profession. This need for change has been assumed in higher education from a long time, but it is still not implemented.

Project-based learning (PBL) is an important part of engineering education where student teams work together to reach a common objective and acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real problems. To make the methodology more effective and successful, the PBL is based upon a complete methodology that, by means of the knowledge structure of the subject, the role-playing activities and the on-going assessment, boosts the students’ abilities to speak in public, to come up with different technical solutions to an engineering problem in the field of marine works and to make the final choice accounting for concepts of security, service and exploitation, lifetime, failure modes and failure probabilities.

The final year of the Bachelor Degree of Civil Engineering in the University of Granada includes a subject of Maritime Works Design where a PBL methodology is implemented. The students are grouped into small teams (2-3 students) to which a project is assigned. The aim of the project is the same to all groups (a maritime work design including global change), but not the location and initial data, so that each project would be different. In addition, a combination of lectures and practical classes are developed during the course, introducing in all of them the theoretical concepts involved and to be applied in the practical lessons. Throughout the practical lessons, the teams work in their projects, discussing the solutions and doubts with the teachers, so that some of the tasks are advanced almost completely in the classroom. One of the key points is the motivation for the teams to participate on a regular basis in role-playing activities, whereby discussions of different technical aspects of the subject were proposed by the teachers. The role-playing activity was used as a way to improve their communication abilities as well as the collaborative work, promoting collaboration over competitiveness. Finally, an oral presentation of the project was done. Although the teachers give free choice to do the oral presentation by one or more members of the teams, in all cases all the members participated in the presentation. Some results are that a large percentage of students have been attending the classes, their motivation has been very high, they have attended tutoring frequently and the interaction teachers-students has been fruitful and enlightening to both parts.