Abstract:

Audiovisual entertainment media has remarkable potential in education. For example, films have usually been used in the classroom for different purposes on many different topics, e.g., listening training in foreign languages, contextualizing historical events or generating group discussions. Moreover, in the last decades, entertainment media have continuously spread with new formats such as successful TV series or very popular streamed videos in online platforms. This opens the possibility of using those resources in an academic context. This potential is being exploited in education, however, it is quite underused in engineering degrees. In this work, we present some uses of cinema, TV series, and streaming videos as a pedagogical resource in fluid mechanics for engineering studies.

We propose a methodology to follow during problem lessons in fluid mechanics to stimulate students' motivation. In particular, we propose introducing and contextualizing problems with short clips. The problem can be driven in several ways, such as exploring the physical or engineering concepts behind a video or checking if a film scene is scientifically accurate. We present the associated methodological details and we propose several examples.

Keywords:

Entertainment media, engineering, teaching.