Abstract:

Generally, in engineering courses, sequence of learning is based on giving a theoretical base and later, with the concepts learned, on introducing practical aspects and using technical software to solve real problems. This paper presents a variation in the learning order and its consequences. The approach is based on making a minimum theoretical explanation, later teaching technological software, raising a real problem, and explaining the theoretical concepts while solving it with the help of the software.
This approach has been applied to students of 5th course of civil engineering of the Technical University of Valencia. The course was Water Resources Analysis. Theory of the course is based in mathematical programming. In particular, linear and dynamic programming is explained and their application to water resources engineering. Professional software is used to develop a simulation model of the management of hydrological basins. In this case AQUATOOL is used as professional software. AQUATOOL is a Decision Support System for planning and management of water resources systems.
Effects of changing the order of educational sequence have been compared with the previous course. In order to evaluate this innovative methodology we did surveys about the course, the teachers and the software. Moreover we based our conclusions in the grades obtained from the theory and the practical exams. We took care about the exams had the same level of difficulty.
Among the results obtained by comparison with the previous course we can conclude that this approach improves the attention and predisposition of students. This was translated in an improvement of the perception of students on the professor and his education. Also it increased the abilities of students in the handling of software. The theoretical concepts were better understood although they were not translated to a greater retention. As negative aspect it has been verified that at the time of approaching a new problem students tend to have a greater dependency of software and not to base their decisions on learned simple concepts of the theory. Perhaps in that aspect it seems that students idealize excessively the models losing self-confidence on their personal intuition.

Keywords:

mathematical modelling, problem based learning, water resources, simulation.