Abstract:

Blended education in Higher Education, especially in postgraduate studies, has one of the trends with the greatest future because it offers opportunities for continuous learning to workers already graduated so that they can upgrade their skills; it improves the competitiveness of the universities adding distance and open education models and it is better adapted to the current health crisis. Despite the undeniable advantages of blended learning, subjects in the scientific-technical field may lead to a reduction of practical activities, which are essential both for the assimilation of content and for developing the capacity for critical analysis and decision making.

To avoid these problems, simulators can be used as a support tool for students training. The development of a simulator is the process of modelling a real system, which makes possible to reproduce situations as in reality and thus to carry out multiple experiments. These experiments can have the purpose of understanding the behaviour of a system or to evaluate strategies with which it can operate.

However, commercial industrial process simulation programs are not specifically oriented towards teaching, since they are professional programs developed for the design of industrial installations and the calculation of processes and systems of industrial interest, and they do not incorporate models that focus on the student.

To overcome these drawbacks, a suitable strategy could be the development by the student of simple simulation modules, using a constructivist learning model. The goal is to provide students with the necessary tools to be able to acquire scientific-technical knowledge through an active methodology.

In this work, we describe the design and development, by the student, of simple simulation modules, using a constructivist learning model, which favours the development of skills and abilities that allow them to understand, analyse, evaluate, apply their knowledge, and encourage their creativity. The work has been divided into five activities ranging from the coordination and definition of the problem to be solved, its development, and finally two evaluation activities: skills acquired and the process itself, completed by students and teachers.

The simulation modules will be developed by means of interactive spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel, which will be developed by the students themselves under the supervision of the teachers. Simulators will be available to the rest of the students through a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in this work the one used is the Moodle platform.

Keywords:

Blended Learning, Design of Simulators, Scientific-technical education.