Abstract:

Students use to face the need to perform a presentation of a project during its studies. This presentation should join both, an oral presentation as well as a written report. In both cases, a usual difficulty that students encounter is that of being synthetic and concise about the work. These are otherwise competences the student should develop during its studies.

In this work, we present the experience of specific and very constrained formats for oral presentation and written reports. The experience has been conducted on engineering studies, within the Control Systems subject, on the degree on Electronic Telecommunications Systems Engineering, where the students have to develop a small control engineering project as part of the final evaluation of the subject.

The oral presentation follows a Powepoint presentation under the Pecha-Kucha format. Pecha-Kucha is a fast-paced presentation style that forces students to focus on their message with automated, 20-second slides. The time constraint is great for student presentations because twenty seconds is long enough to make a solid point but not enough to prattle. The Pecha-Kucha time and slide constraints prevents the student from mentioning everything they could find on the topic in hopes that they hit upon the point you wanted them to make. This encourages the presenter to know the topic well enough to distil what is important and needs to be covered in the 20 slides. Lastly, when the fast-paced presentation is over the speaker(s) then open the floor for questions and dialogue with their audience, further allowing them to demonstrate their understanding of the topic.

Along these lines, the written report is forced to follow the typical IEEE conference style. Students are provided with the word and latex templates for such format. They have to be able to follow all the instructions regarding the letter, figures, references, sections, etc. Also the page length constraint is important because they have to constraint to the usual six, double column, pages.

By using these two well established formats, the students benefit from different perspectives: learn how to follow established format guidelines, report structures, etc; will be faced to synthetic presentations; provide direct and concise information about their ideas; get familiar with the use of digital resources in order to enrich their presentation but without being too disturbing. All these, among others, are tackled at once within the context of engineering project presentations.

The paper exposes the concrete experience in the Control Systems subject, by describing the kind of project the students are facing, benefits with respect to usual Powerpoint presentations, motivations for classroom discussion on the basis of the Pecha-Kucha presentation, etc.

Keywords:

Learning and Teaching Methodologies, Problem and Project-Based Learning.