Abstract:

At the Technische Universiät München (TUM) in Munich Germany, the curriculum of the study program Electrical Engineering and Information Technology includes lectures, practical courses, internships, projects, and seminars. Within this paper, the restructuring of the “Seminar on Electrical Actuators” at the Institute of Energy Conversion Technology will be explained. Furthermore, it will be shown, how it becomes possible to teach both technical and soft skills. Acquainting students with technical topics in the field of power engineering is one general goal of this seminar. They usually work on their own on different topics without any contact to each other, supported by one supervisor. During this seminar, students gain first or deeper knowledge about scientific working and writing. This common structure still is executed within the German study program. In contrast, after adapting this format to the English Master’s program at TUM, problems appeared, such as low presentation skills, high concurrence between the students, cultural and educational differences, and therefore almost no collaboration between the students during the seminar. Thus, the structure had to be adapted in order to provide the appropriate environment for the students to learn and experience soft skills. For example, topics for individuals were transformed to group work or comparative topics for more than one student. Input concerning presentation skills and feedback was added to the seminar structure. The focus is still set on technical topics while researching literature, evaluating it and concluding the information within a scientific report. Within the paper, the restructuring, changes, and solutions for the aforementioned problems will be presented and briefly scrutinized due to the evaluation results.

Keywords:

Scientific working, scientific writing, presentation skills, seminar, teaching, education.