MODELLING AS AN INNOVATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR ENGINEERING AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

European Higher Education Area (EHEA) development represents a deep change in student’s teaching and learning process, as well as for the role performed by the professor or teacher. A considerable effort must be done on identifying learning activities that allow improving transversal and specific competencies, to make the students responsible of their own learning process.

To meet the objectives, this paper proposes an activity that uses modelling as an innovative methodology. Although it is possible to apply this methodology to different education levels, it will be focused into secondary education and university degree courses. It could be also an interesting methodology to use in postgraduate (master) education oriented courses.

Modelling can be view as the process that replaces a real scenario by a mathematical model that explains it partial or globally. In turn, experimentation with the model and the real world can refine or adjust the mathematical model developed.

This activity involves modelling to represent real life scenarios, in which the student interacts (even building real scaled based models), makes observations, analyses, establishes the mathematical relationships between the real and modelled observations and finally, make conclusions.

Traditional teaching-learning models start with abstract concepts sometimes followed with examples more or less close to the real world. Consequently, student motivation can be affected versus functional learning, always connected to real world.

The activity proposed forces the student to analyse the Thales challenge when he tried to measure the high of the Keops pyramid. Specifically for secondary education, it would be convenient to build the pyramid, taking advantage of the skills obtain in technology subjects. For university degrees is more convenient to use dynamic geometry software tools or symbolic calculus as Geogebra or Maple.