Abstract:

Universities observe that students lack scientific working skills when they are requested to do a bachelor or master thesis at the end of their studies. Students use various web-references, especially Wikipedia. They rarely formulate a research question, do not comment on their working methods and do not summarize their working results at the end of their theses.

One of the reasons for this is that students are not educated to carry out scientific projects.
In addition, students often complete their studies in industry. The industry is requesting the students to develop an application or a program rather than to research on a specific topic.

We have therefore developed a module to acquire scientific working skills. We have embedded the module into projects based learning courses using Do It Yourself (DIY) tools.

In our paper, we describe our intended learning outcomes (ILO). They include scientific writing and research skills. We introduce teaching methods and discuss, why these methods are used in the module. We combine classical teaching methods with project based learning. We introduce our grading schema and methodology.

Based on our first experiences, we are convinced, that such modules can significantly increase scientific working competencies of students. The integration of the such modules into project based learning does not require major efforts. DIY tools are a perfect platform to start research projects.

Keywords:

Research based skills, project based learning, DIY tools.