Abstract:

In recent years, the educational trends in undergraduate studies are moving toward developing more and more practical study plans, thus avoiding the old master classes that do not have any feedback between the teacher and the student, to evaluate at the end of the course the knowledge of the students in written exams, without getting to know if the student is understanding the knowledge and would be able to apply them in a practical situation. In addition, it should be noted that this type of teaching distance universities and the knowledge acquired in them, from the labor market and companies, since the student does not get to apply this knowledge in practical cases. In 1999, the Bologna Declaration began, consisting of a system that seeks to align the university with business life and reformulate the paradigm of higher education to facilitate the employability of students. Linking the labor market with universities to train skilled workers is one of the most requested demands by both companies and students, leaving the latter from the university without tools to apply in their job. The solution proposed in the following study is to propose a practical project by groups in which the student must solve a practical case step by step, using the knowledge acquired in the different topics.

The application of this method has been carried out with almost 30 students every year, for 5 years, in the subject of “Ingeniería del frío en industrias Agroalimentarias”, from the “Grado en Ingeniería Agroalimentaria y del Medio Rural” (GIAMR), taught at the “Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Agronómica y del Medio Natural” (ETSIAMN) in the “Universitat Politecnica de Valencia” (UPV), in other words, a cold engineering subject at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. In this subject a project is proposed in which they will have to design a cold installation that contains at least one freezing process and one refrigeration of a food that they select. The students are divided into groups of three people, and the different groups are divided among the teachers of the subject, who become the tutors of these groups and must evaluate the progress every two weeks, after each topic. At the end of the project, students must defend their project in an oral presentation in which each component should speak for five minutes, followed by a round of questions to the student that the teacher wants, in order to avoid the maximum that any of the students has not collaborated in the preparation of the project.

Therefore, it has been possible to develop a learning method that forces students to apply the theoretical knowledge learned during the lessons in a practical case, thanks to which they will have search tools and basic knowledge applied that will be useful in the work environment.

Keywords:

Practical project, engineering, division of learning, undergraduate.