Development of a method of assessment of the problem-solving competence at the technical University of Madrid.

The competence evaluation promoted by the European High Education Area entails a very important methodological change that requires guiding support to help lecturers carry out this new and complex task. In this regard, the Technical University of Madrid (UPM, by its Spanish acronym) has financed a series of coordinated projects with the objective of developing a model for teaching and evaluating core competences and providing support to lecturers. This paper deals with the problem-solving competence. The first step has been to elaborate a guide for teachers to provide a homogeneous way to asses this competence. This guide considers several levels of acquisition of the competence and provides the rubrics to be applied for each one. The guide has been subsequently validated with several pilot experiences. In this paper we will explain the problem-solving assessment guide for teachers and will show the pilot experiences that has been carried out. We will finally justify the validity of the method to assess the problem-solving competence.

Supporting the design and development of Project Based Learning courses.

The use of Project Based Learning has spread widely over the last decades, not only throughout countries but also among disciplines. One of the most significant characteristics of this methodology is the use of ill-structured problems as central activity during the course, which represents an important difficulty for both teachers and students. This work presents a model, supported by a tool, focused on helping teachers and students in Project Based Learning, overcoming these difficulties. Firstly, teachers are guided in designing the project following the main principles of this methodology. Once the project has been specified at the desired level of depth, the same tool helps students to finish the project specification and organize the implementation. Collaborative work among different users is allowed in both phases. This tool has been satisfactorily tested designing two real projects used in Computer Engineering and Software Engineering degrees.

The development of a wind tunnel DAQ system by using Labview tools

This paper presents the experimental three-year learning activity developed by a group of teachers in a wind tunnel facility. The authors, leading a team of students, carried out a project consisting of the design, assembly and testing of a wind tunnel. The project included all stages of the process from its initial specifications to its final quality flow assessments, going through the calculation of each element, and the building of the whole wind tunnel. The group of (final year) students was responsible for the whole wind tunnel project as a part of their bachelor degree project. The paper focuses on the development of wind tunnel data acquisition software. This automatic tool is essential to improve the automation of the data acquisition of the wind tunnel facility systems, in particular for a 6DOF multi-axis force/torque sensor. This work can be considered as a typical example of real engineering practice: a set of specifications that has to be modified due to the constraints imposed throughout the project, in order to obtain the final result

Development of a method of assessment of the problem-solving competency at the Technical University of Madrid

The competence evaluation promoted by the European High Education Area entails a very important methodological change that requires guiding support to help lecturers carry out this new and complex task. In this regard, the Technical University of Madrid (UPM, by its Spanish acronym) has financed a series of coordinated projects with the objective of developing a model for teaching and evaluating core competences and providing support to lecturers. This paper deals with the problem solving competence. The first step has been to elaborate a guide for teachers to provide an homogeneous way to asses this competence. This guide considers several levels of acquisition of the competence and provided the rubrics to be applied for each one. The guide has been subsequently validated with several pilot experiences. In this paper we will explain the problem-solving assessment guide for teachers and will show the pilot experiences that has been carried out. We will finally justify the validity of the method to assess the problem solving competence.

Design, development and evaluation of a portable recording system to capture dynamic presentations using the teacher's tablet PC

Computers and multimedia equipment have improved a lot in the last years. They have reduced their cost and size while at the same time increased their capabilities. These improvements allowed us to design and implement a portable recording system that also integrates the teacher��s tablet PC to capture what he/she writes on the slides and all that happens in it. This paper explains this system in detail and the validation of the recordings that we did after using it to record all the lectures the ���Communications Software��� course in our university. The results show that pupils used the recordings for different purposes and consider them useful for a variety of things, especially after missing a lecture.