Abstract:

The use of cinema and TV series as a pedagogical resource has been widely explored at all educational levels, from elementary school to university. However, this kind of resources are not specially exploited in engineering education. This work proposes a pedagogical framework and particular examples to explore different possibilities in this direction. In particular, the use of short clips is considered to motivate students during theoretical and problem lessons.

Depending on the content of the clip, two main groups are defined: clips to historically contextualise a topic and clips to illustrate the application of a concept and motivate the resolution of a problem. The first group includes films and tv series based on historical events, from the industrial revolution to the space race. Historical contextualisation gives the engineering student a way to see the origin of a particular topic or realise how a theoretical concept has historically been applied. In the second group, a wide variety of genres can be considered, from historical to science-fiction. In this case, the clip is used to formulate a problem that will be solved in class. This problem can be motivated in several ways, e.g., to explore the physical or engineering concepts behind the problem or to check if the scene is realistic from a scientific point of view. Both groups of applications are studied in this work, and several examples are presented.

Keywords:

Cinema, engineering, university, teaching.