Abstract:

Traditionally, the practical part of many subjects consists of the presentation of problems which the lecturer solves in the classroom. This leads to superficial learning, since understanding how a problem has been solved does not imply knowing how to solve it. In this context, students remain passive and focus on the quantitative aspects of the problem rather than on the conceptual aspects that show the way to solve the problem. This lack of qualitative reflection leads to a mechanistic operationalism that causes serious difficulties when facing new problems.

These difficulties have been detected over the years in the subject Quantitative Methods of Industrial Organisation, which belongs to the 3rd year of the Degree in Industrial Organisation Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València that offers students various Operational Research techniques to tackle problems of industrial organisation.

To avoid the problems detected above and to promote the active role of students in the classroom by encouraging their cooperative learning, the problem-puzzle activity is proposed. This methodology, in its most general form, consists of seven steps in which students work both collaboratively and cooperatively on solving three different problems. Each student approaches the three problems in a different way: first the student analyses how one problem should be solved, second the student solves another problem following the proposal made by another student, and third, the student reviews, justifies and draws conclusions about the results obtained by his or her peers on the problem that had not yet been assigned to him or her.

This methodology has been applied to the Quantitative Methods of Industrial Organisation course, which has allowed students to work cooperatively and collaboratively to solve three different problems in a reduced space of time (one and a half hour). Specifically, it has been applied to the topic of Queueing Theory, so that the three problems provided to the students correspond to three possible queuing systems that could be adopted by the same company, being able to draw the conclusion of which queuing system would be the most appropriate.

The students have shown great satisfaction with the activity, showing a greater interest in the topic of Queueing Theory after the activity. They have also shared with the lecturer that the activity has helped them to internalise many of the concepts learnt, to learn to identify the different queuing systems and has allowed some doubts to arise that have allowed a greater understanding of the subject studied.

Keywords:

Problem-puzzle, active learning, cooperative learning, collaborative learning, quantitative methods.