Abstract:

It is clear, for all of us that participate in the learning process that the first year student in higher learning schools, specially public universities, get in with multiple academic deficiencies, which must be efficiently overtaken in order for the student to move forward in the "natural" order of his/her studies, i.e., in the time slotted, usually 4 years, when a student does not finish in such time it is said that he/her has "fallen back", or worst the student will not be able to finish, and the resources invested in him/her will be for not.

There are many reasons for a student to fall into the two described options, there are social economics implications, personal, academic, motivational and many others. In this work we are concerned with the motivation and academic, and in fact we believe that they are strongly linked. A highly motivated student will find a way to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

We believe that by presenting the student with motivational tools they will be more likely to refocus their efforts to surpass their academic problems, which in engineering schools, much of the problems arise from physics and mathematics courses.

We believe that the scientific research and its popularization are powerful motivational tools, that show the students that the mathematics and physics do have real world applications and lead to interesting and wonderful new knowledge and technologies.

In this context, we have study the impact that a research seminar has on the student community. By polling the audience of each talk, during a 1 and half year period we have found that in fact activities such as this one have a positive impact. We will show through an statistical analysis that around of a quarter of the student body are interested in some fashion in participating in the scientific process and as such there is a motivation that will move them forward and hurdle some of the obstacles presented to them.

Keywords:

Scientific Research, Scientific Communication.