Abstract:

In this work, we present the first edition of the educational activity named “technological challenge” specially focused on the students at School of Telecommunication Engineering (E.T.S.I.T.), but open to all students of the “Universidad de Málaga”. This initiative has been developed in the context of the educational innovation project PIE13-84 funded by the “Universidad de Málaga”; in collaboration with “Servicio de Publicaciones y Divulgación Científica” and the department “Ingeniería de Comunicaciones”; and the support of E.T.S.I.T, the International Excellence Campus Andalucia Tech and the enterprise Google.

The activity consists mainly in the formulation of a problem that students must solve in a certain period of time on competitive basis, in such a way that a court or commission of experts selects the best one.

This activity responds to the need to bring the students to the real issues that they will have to solve as future graduates. The challenge is a way to encourage them to implement their knowledge, creativity and ingenuity to solve practical problems. It is an opportunity to apply both knowledge and skills acquired during their academic training.

The project is presented as an opportunity to bring closer the university and business, in a stage previous to the master thesis, that will improve the overall vision of the student on your field and promote entrepreneurial culture through the competitive regime in which activity develops. Another objective is that companies approach the university in a more natural way to propose problems that can be solved through collaboration. The technological challenge also encourages the search for new business.

The first edition of this activity has been raised by means of the question "How much could you compress the information?" The challenge has been to develop a compression algorithm specifically designed for an image that has been provided to all participants, in order to obtain the best compression ratio and the highest similarity between the original image and the one recovered after the decompression process.

The whole process of participation has been channeled through the web-based platform “Campus Virtual”, which has been opened to all students with the only condition to be enrolled in a course of the University of Málaga. At the end of the process, the winner of the challenge made a presentation of its proposal at a public session in which delivery of the corresponding award was made.

In this edition, seven teachers have participated through their corresponding subjects, all of them belonging to the telecommunication degrees. Although the call for the activity has broadcasted to the whole university, the 40 students who participated in the initiative belong to telecommunication degrees of the ETIST. This indicates that generic advertising aimed at the entire university community is having little success. However, the same activities proposed directly by the teacher during the development of the classes are much better accepted by the students.

The activity has been evaluated positively by both the teachers and the students, which has encouraged us to prepare the second edition to begin in September 2014. To increase participation, the second edition will focus on multidisciplinary, more generic and less technical topics.

Keywords:

Dynamization, challenge, telecommunication, group activity.