Abstract:

The coordination among different subjects in the same degree is an issue of utmost importance to provide students with a coordinated route during their university career. This is the trigger for the ACUARIO Project, whose main objective is to establish connections with reality, promote cooperative work among subjects and support the integrated development of specific competences and transferable skills. To this end, the project is based on innovative active learning strategies, complemented by hands-on laboratory approach, which introduces authentic practical activities, typical of a laboratory, in a classroom setting with a small number of students interacting collaboratively. Through direct sensory experience (seeing, hearing, touching and feeling), this approach provides ideas and concepts to be assimilated in a more elaborate and lasting way, in constant restructuring and hierarchisation, which leads to more solid and deeper learning.

The ACUARIO project uses a marine aquarium as a backbone for the solution of contemporary problems and challenges in 3rd and 4th-year subjects of the Degree in Chemical Engineering at the Escuela Politécnica Superior de Alcoy of Universitat Politècnica de València.

This article aims to describe, in detail, the coordinated activities among the following subjects:
(i) Process Analysis and Simulation that will determine the water evaporation rate
(ii) Business Organisation and Production Systems that will determine the water demand forecasting based on the previous evaporation rate and historical data,
(iii) Engineering Projects that will determine the installation design proposal by taking into account data from the two previous activities.

Keywords:

Hands-on learning, coordination, chemical engineering degree, aquarium.