Abstract:

Over the last few years we have been producing learning materials for courses on Engineering, particularly for a heat transfer course. We started developing simulators (using Wolfram Mathematica), which allow students performing more complex and generic calculations than the ones they usually carry out in conventional courses (where most of the times they still depend on using static tables and graphs). Later, we embedded these simulators within interactive notebooks in which students could follow, each one on his own computer or tablet, the teacher’s lesson in real time in the classroom. Main results of these two developments have been presented at previous EduLearn conferences. In the current development, we are converting the interactive notebooks into self-learning materials. By this way the new versions of the interactive notebooks could become suitable as support materials for innovative pedagogical methodologies such as the flipped classroom or as self-study materials. To achieve this goal, we have embedded text, live tables and graphs selected from a web-based application integrating engineering and technical references (Knovel) within the notebooks. The methodology we used to develop the new version of the notebooks was as follows: we began by analyzing presentations based on standard slides which we had used to teach these subjects in precedent courses to elaborate a script of the items we were going to search for in the web-based application. Then, the course’s teacher (one of the authors) selected, based on his experience, among the huge diversity of available sources, those texts, live graphics and tables that we were going to incorporate in a given notebook. The texts in the web-based application are all written in English and have a .PDF format, so they must be converted into a text format and translated before they can be incorporated into the notebooks, which are intended for Mexican students. Once the translation is done, the materials in Spanish were incorporated into the interactive notebooks. We present here examples of the new version of the notebooks developed with this methodology, and also examples of how they have been used in a heat transfer course at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Keywords:

Interactive notebooks, Heat transfer, Mathematica simulators, Knovell references, live tables.