Abstract:

University competitions are tournaments where undergraduate students have to demonstrate their skills and technical knowledge dealing with real projects. Therefore, this kind of serious games provides a frame to develop methodologies based on design projects, which motivate students and prepare them to concurrent engineering, interpersonal and communication skills.

This work explains in a straightforward way our experience in MotoStudent; a one and a half year competition where students have to seek funding, design and manufacture a racing motorcycle. The department of Mechanical and Mining Engineering of the University of Jaén is involved in this program from the academic year 2010-2011 to the present. The methodology was developed and focused on a reduced group of students from different engineering degrees. The scheme takes into account a recruitment process, training activities addressed by seminars and tutorial lectures, a tasks division in multidisciplinary groups, and finally an assessment procedure based on the defence of partial projects.

This methodology gives good results in terms of skills acquired and motivation. Nevertheless, we have also detected some problems that are discussed in the present work like: how to get funding for the project, the coordination between students and also between trainers and students, and how to include this project in the student academic curriculum.

Keywords:

Multi-university competitions, design project, engineering education.