CREATING YOUR OWN APP FOR AN ENGINEERING SUBJECT: A BRIEF COMMENT

Over the last 5 years, the educational innovation group “Tertio Millenio” from the Madrid Technical University (UPM) has developed various web tools to address several challenges in large groups at the School of civil engineering: e.g. Attention, classroom management, monitoring and feedback to students. One of these challenges is how to organise course content efficiently for learners so that they can easily find information on a subject. Usually, information becomes scattered among the different tools used by learners to study the subject: Videos, Moodle tasks, forums in Telegram, course and activity calendar. Hence it is difficult for students to engage with all of the application tools at the same time and often they are not fully aware of the multiple channels they can employ when approaching the course.

Given that almost all learners have smartphones, lecturers decided to create an App which concentrates all the tools employed in the courses of ‘Construction Machinery’ as well as ‘Building and prefabrication’ so that learners gained direct and simultaneous access to the respective applications found in the subject. A first App was developed by using Java; however, as this was a complex procedure to be handled by lecturers, a second App was developed and tried at the beginning of this academic year. For the creation of this tool lecturers resorted to a comparative analysis of existing web tools that do not necessarily require programming knowledge. The resulting App was developed with AppCreator24 (https://www.appcreator.com) and has proved to be useful for students in the follow up of the course. In fact, this is the first App of a series of applications that optimise student time and effort invested in managing content and information on the subject. This application is designed to help students with their learning process.