Abstract:

“Environmental Engineering” is a four-year degree program at the Bilbao Faculty of Engineering (UPV/EHU). In their final year, students can choose the course entitled “Acoustics and Noise” that focuses on basic acoustic concepts. The course takes place over 15 weeks and includes lectures and classroom problems (3 ECTS), laboratories (0.9 ECTS) and seminars (0.6 ECTS). Sixty ECTS credits are the equivalent of a full year of study.This work describes the activities related to laboratories and seminars. In laboratory work, students perform the experiments and write a report. In seminar activities, students research a topic, write a review and give a talk. Before these activities, students deepen their training in data processing, literature review, writing and referencing, and public speaking. To take into account the individual effort of students in this part of the course we use peer assessment.

In addition, based on students’ comments, we propose a new activity for the next courses. It is a problem based learning (PBL) activity, focused on the acoustics of a classroom. Students will work on room reverberation and speech intelligibility. For the experimental practice, they will use smartphone applications. At the end of the work, they will have to suggest some actions to improve acoustic comfort of the classroom. This work can help the students to develop other important skills for their future professional performance.

Keywords:

Communication skills, PBL, acoustics, environmental engineering degree.