Abstract:

Limitations of formal teaching in the classroom, such as unidirectional communication, methodical stiffness, orientation of the result to the pass degree, etc. can influence in a substantial way the motivation and the expectations of the students, giving a significant reduction of the academic process.

The current education implies a deep thought’s exercise about the teaching-learning method. It’s necessary a bigger effort to create a new educational model in order to achieve significant and enduring learning, with a more innovative teaching and interactive methods that cause the information search in the student. Taking this premise as our starting point, the MotoStudent project is a perfect example for the engineering students to acquire interest for mechanics and business management. This competition is an ideal frame to develop and to put into practice the skills and capacities that are pretended to be learned in the classroom, and which they tend to complete in a self-taught way, to be provided with subject understanding, and to acquire learnings and know-how, efficiently and permanently.

The main goal of this project is for Mechanical Engineering students to acquire specific or professional and transversal competences out of the classrooms, accomplishing a program, with the real world business liabilities.

The competition developed in two phases:
- The MS1 phase, which evaluated the industrial aspects, was a demonstrative phase in which the participant teams had to show and explain the realized prototype design and the industrialization project towards serial production. In addition, teams had to orally expose their project in the face of a specialized jury and to defend and to justify their choice.
- The MS2 phase was an experimental validation phase, in which participant’s prototype motorcycles that had overcome with a minimum of 40% in the punctuation of the MS1 phase, should demonstrate their quality overcoming the various proofs of the motorcycling circuit.
Students express a high satisfaction with this activity, due to the fact that they have carried out a real experience where they have applied their knowledge and competences, they have related with other universities and they have interchanged opinions and abilities.

The educative project realization out of the classrooms leads to a high creativity level, due to the fact that students participate in real projects where they can interact with people from outside the educational field, which leads to develop experiences and contexts of creative learning. This interuniversity competition’s formula is a way to increase the experimental load of the engineering discipline, where it’s facilitated the acquisition of professional and traversal competences needed to the business world.

Keywords:

Competition, Mechanical Engineering, Creative learning.