ACTIVE LEARNING IN KEY SUBJECTS OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEGREE

Chemical Engineering is a Bachelor´s Degree that includes the design of the industrial processes that turn raw materials into valuable products. Moreover, many of the processes within chemical engineering involve chemical reactions, which should be considered in order to formulate more adequate designs. It needs a thorough understanding of how the different unit operations are included in a chemical plant and what are the implications of changing operation variables in a process. All these concepts are difficult to grasp for many students and they stay in a quite passive attitude, so a different innovative approach has been implemented in order to increase students´ understanding and participation. This paper presents an education innovation that can help students to improve their learning and understanding of the different operations involved in a chemical plant and thus, to get better results in the subjects and to achieve the desired outcomes.

In this experience, an active learning based on the joint use of several methodologies (flipped classroom, peer instruction or gamification) are being applied in three subjects of the Chemical Engineering Degree at the Technical University of Madrid. Specifically, it has already been implemented in Process Control (4th course) and will also be applied the next course in Process and product design (4th course) and Chemical Reactors (3rd course).

Flipped classroom is applied using educational videos/screencasts and complemented with traditional material as slides or texts. The student learns by himself in advance the contents of the topic to be discussed in the following class; the peer instruction is implemented using concept test, and finally, gamification is based on the use of game (like trivia) to learn and understand in a funnier way. It is important to remark that the methodology applied is not based on a single one but on the application and integration of several ones. In order to implement the mentioned methods, the following material has been developed: screencasts, concept tests, trivia contest and simulations besides the traditional lecturing material (slides and text).

The results obtained in Process control subject after the implementation of this methodology for the first time show high student motivation, higher participation in class and better results (marks) in the subject. The same results are expected for the other two subjects.