Abstract:

The educational innovation group in Physics Applied to Building has been working for years on the implementation of new teaching methodologies to bring the teaching of physical phenomena closer to the diversity of students in the classrooms of the Madrid School of Building Engineering (ETSEM). It has been observed that new students, both in Bachelor's and Master's degree courses, have certain difficulties in the understanding of physical phenomena and their possible applications to real life. For this reason, we are committed to implementing new teaching methodologies to make classes more interactive, to make the most of the university's facilities and resources and to link teaching projects with the research objectives of the university teaching staff.

To this end, the Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) model has been implemented as a teaching methodology to actively involve students in the resolution of a real problem, linked to their professional activity related to building and which promotes the acquisition of the competences included in the curriculum of the subjects. In this way, the teachers strive to pose challenges that provide concrete solutions of use to society, which allow them to explain the contents of the Applied Physics (Bachelor's Degree) and Building Monitoring (Master's Degree) subjects and to go deeper into the more complex sections. In order to achieve these objectives, ETSEM students have the support of the institution to access different technological and bibliographic resources, personalised tutorials by the teaching staff and mutual support among students to encourage peer learning.

This paper presents an example of how to implement the ABR methodology in higher education. To this end, it shows the guidelines followed when planning a semester course of the subject "Monitoring of Buildings for their energy certification, safety and rehabilitation" of the ETSEM in which ABR has been used as an active methodology when developing the syllabus of the subject. It has been verified with the master's degree students that this type of teaching initiative not only favours the development of the competences and objectives included in the learning guide, but also improves their understanding of the more cumbersome concepts that will later be applied in their working life. This generates a convergence between the teacher's motivation to teach the contents of the subject, and the students' interest in developing new skills and abilities that will allow them to integrate in a differentiated way in the labour market. Thus, this research shows the possibilities offered by the ABR in university environments with students of the master's degree in Technological Innovation in Building, summarising the steps followed to implement the methodology, the planning carried out and the evaluation template used. The final objective is to show university teachers interested in the ABR methodology the possibilities of this pedagogical tool for its application in the classroom.

Keywords:

Challenge-Based Learning, Applied Physics, Educational Innovation, University.