Abstract:

A lot of engineering programs of universities are designed according with international standards. Associations like IEEE, AIM, AIS and organizations like ABET and ASIIN among others, define characteristics and skills related to team working, multidisciplinary issues and collaborative tasks. Institutions that want to measure these abilities, often work with project-based learning (PBL), a pedagogical strategy that eases the creation of multidisciplinary spaces, where the students participate with their abilities and knowledge. However, some classroom projects present challenges as:
(i) planning of schedule considering the time required to develop a solution against the time needed by the student to acquire the right knowledge to develop it,
(ii) student awareness of the impact that the solution has in the problem domain
(iii) commitment of students with projects lasting more than one semester.

This paper presents Citizen Science projects as an alternative to solve such problems along with the participation of different specialists, disciplines, roles (citizens and scientific) and mechanisms of collaboration. This pedagogical strategy has been developed within a software engineering course, measured with a formative assessment and compared with another project in the traditional client-supplier schema.

Keywords:

Citizen Science, Project-Based Learning, System Engineering.