Abstract:

Engineers work with calculations. For example, industrial engineers have to calculate the energy balance or the mass balance of a process; agricultural engineers have to calculate the irrigation dose or the fertiliser dose for a crop depending on the agro-system conditions; architects have to calculate the size of structural elements in a building. But are they aware of the typical and abnormal values? An engineer needs to know, without making a calculation, whether a given value for a particular process or item is out of range or could be credible. Looking at the figures or values that students calculate and present as correct in their exams, there is ample evidence that in many or even most cases they are not aware of what could be a correct value and what is definitely a wrong value. This is unacceptable for future professional activity. In this situation, the Teaching Innovation Group INGENIAQ of the University of León designed a teaching innovation activity to help students to be aware of typical values and to be able to quickly identify the values that are out of range. Two pilot actions have been carried out. The first for industrial engineers and the second for agricultural engineers. In the first case, the student should be able to detect anomalous or erroneous values in protocols and/or manuals in the context of manufacturing in pharmaceutical plants. The proposal of corrections to the errors found will be valued. For the agricultural engineers, the activity consisted in simulating a conversation between a well-trained and experienced farmer and the future engineer, in which the farmer evaluates a specific aspect of a crop in the light of the agronomic practices carried out and the agroclimatic conditions. This information is supposedly given by the farmer and is available to the students. The hypothetical conversation is given to the students as a written page and the students are given 3 minutes (the estimated time to read a page of 500 words) to identify abnormal data; in a second stage, they are given a further 6 minutes to give a range of normality for the data considered abnormal; in a third stage, they are given a further 45 minutes to accurately calculate the exact values based on the available information and to identify what information is missing. The missing information, if any, would be estimated by the students taking into account the normal values expected for the given agrosystem. A future development will be to dramatise the meeting between the farmer and the future engineer in a role play to develop their social skills. The activity has proved to be useful in developing skills related to self-criticism, critical thinking and, with the update, social skills.

Keywords:

STEM, industrial engineering, agricultural engineering, pharmaceutical plants, typical values, out of range values.