Abstract:

Chemical engineers of the future will be working in different jobs, addressing new problems in a continously changing environment. 3D printing, virtual reality, blockchain or machine learning are examples of emerging transversal technologies in the last decade, being applied nowadays to different industries. Therefore, the next chemical engineers' generation will be required to demonstrate additional skills, apart from the mere technical knowledge associated with the profession (i.e. separation technology, reaction engineering, process control...). Team working, creativity, oral and written expression or autonomous learning, will be some of the keys in the professional careers of the future chemical engineers. For this reason, much effort is being made to include them in the curricula of the current engineering degrees.

Moreover, our previous work (Rodríguez et al., 2018) at the Educational Innovation on Chemical Engineering group (EIChE) has shown that motivation can be very important in the learning process of some technical subjects such as Process Control. The application of the active learning approach in Chemical Engineering subjects has been demonstrated to improve not only motivation but also global student outcomes.

In this work, we present the re-design of the teaching activities in the subject Process and Product Design belonging to the fourth course of the Chemical Engineering Degree at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Traditional teaching in this subject covered four different blocks: property modelling, process modelling, product engineering and process engineering. Each block was taught independently with different conventional evaluation methods.

The main goal of the re-design is putting the students in the center of the learning process. There are also different specific objectives to be covered. On the one hand, “soft skills” such as team working, creativity and oral and written expression are now introduced through new working and evaluation activities. These new activities are based on both flipped learning and project-based learning approaches in such a way that the different themes of the subject are now more intimately bound resulting in a more integrated learning. On the other hand, gamification activities have also been introduced in the syllabus. The objective of using games in the classroom is catching the attention of the students for the less appealing themes while promoting their engagement and increasing their global motivation to the subject.

In the first part of the work, an introduction to the context and the traditional teaching methodology is presented. Then, the re-design of the subject is explained giving details of the new activities introduced and the problems and benefits encountered.

References:
[1] Rodríguez, M., Díaz, I., Gonzalez, E.J., González-Miquel, M., 2018. Motivational active learning: An integrated approach to teaching and learning process control. Educ. Chem. Eng. 24, 7–12. doi:10.1016/J.ECE.2018.06.003

Keywords:

Chemical engineering, flipped learning, active learning.