A bibliometric and classification study of Project-based Learning in engineering education

Engineering education has been the subject of studies in search of approaches that provide better results in terms of learning. The Project Based Learning approach (PBL) is the subject of this study from the point of view of its application in Engineering. The objective is to present a classification and bibliometric analysis of PBL in Engineering. Publications on the subject were identified through queries at the journal databases at ISI Web of Science and Scopus SCImago between 2000 and 2016. The results highlight the benefits from the use of the PBL approach to learning in Engineering showing increased absorption of technical content by students and the development of soft and multi-disciplinary skills. The bibliometric analysis revealed the most relevant journals in the subject, authors and the most cited papers and keywords. New horizons to advance the use of PBL in engineering education are discussed

QuadLab: A Project-Based Learning Toolkit for Automation and Robotics Engineering Education

It is frequently claimed that the students must have an active role in building and transforming their own knowledge, and the teacher's labor is to provide the students the necessary tools in order to reach specific learning objectives, included in a course program. This paper presents an aerial robotic system as a toolkit, and proposes a series of activities focused on the learning in automation and robotics. These proposed activities have been designed based upon the project-based learning methodology, and they facilitate the achievement of the learning objectives presented by Spanish automation committee(CEA) in conjunction with The International Society of Automation (ISA) to satisfy the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) standard. The toolkit and the activities are oriented to impulse the practical teaching, giving the student additional motivation and, in consequence, improving his or her active role. Besides, the toolkit and the activities give the teacher a tool in which it is possible to assess the students learning process

Engineers' education in digital era

 The Fourth Industrial Revolution has already taken around the world. Decision taking at industries is more and more dependent on new technologies and processes, which demand updating and adjustment of the engineering education. Through a systematized literature revision, this article aims to search, select and prioritize bibliographic sources which reflect relevant initiatives that may work as a reference for engineering bachelor´s degree courses. 50 most relevant articles were selected and analyzed from 4,333 articles published in the Scopus database. The results show the 10 main authors, the 9 main journals and the 10 main institutions among the 50 most relevant articles, as references in the analyzed sample. Regarding aspects for the improvement of engineers education, one can highlight PBL (Project-Based Learning), Competency-Based Education and focus on holistic education. This research may encourage reflection, awareness and improvement by the ones interested in the study of engineers' education, by integrating market demand, learners' expectations and academic excellence, in order to contribute to the growth of scientific and practical knowledge and of society technological development.

Engineers' education in digital era

 The Fourth Industrial Revolution has already taken around the world. Decision taking at industries is more and more dependent on new technologies and processes, which demand updating and adjustment of the engineering education. Through a systematized literature revision, this article aims to search, select and prioritize bibliographic sources which reflect relevant initiatives that may work as a reference for engineering bachelor´s degree courses. 50 most relevant articles were selected and analyzed from 4,333 articles published in the Scopus database. The results show the 10 main authors, the 9 main journals and the 10 main institutions among the 50 most relevant articles, as references in the analyzed sample. Regarding aspects for the improvement of engineers education, one can highlight PBL (Project-Based Learning), Competency-Based Education and focus on holistic education. This research may encourage reflection, awareness and improvement by the ones interested in the study of engineers' education, by integrating market demand, learners' expectations and academic excellence, in order to contribute to the growth of scientific and practical knowledge and of society technological development.

The perceptions of faculty engaged in a curricular change to project based learning in an engineering school at Brazil

The curricular change of an engineering school had as guideline the partial replacement of traditional school activities by Projects and Workshops, which put students as the main protagonists in the learning process, working actively. In this context, faculty were encouraged to propose activities that fulfil this request. Teachers from various specialties and even those who work in more advanced disciplines have submitted their proposals, which were offered to freshman students of an engineering course. The opening of the new curriculum began in 2015 when those activities were introduced in the course. The aim of this study is to know, analyze and evaluate the perception from teachers engaged in create these Projects and Workshops to this new curriculum. The survey was conducted from two focus groups, one with teachers’ proponents of Projects and other with teachers’ proponents of Workshops. The results show that the teachers attribute different meanings to the goals, strategies, evaluation and their own role in the process, though all the activities aim to ensure a common basis on engineering knowledge, which reflects the inductive character chosen in the curricular change.This work has been partially supported by projects COMPETE-POCI-01-0145-FEDER- 007043 and FCT-UID-CEC-00319-2013, from Portugalinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Software Radio Challenge Accelerating Education and Innovation in Wireless Communications

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents our methodology and tools for introducing competition in the electrical engineering curriculum to accelerate education and innovation in wireless communications. Software radio or software-defined radio (SDR) enables wireless technology, systems and standards education where the student acts as the radio developer or engineer. This is still a huge endeavor because of the complexity of current wireless systems and the diverse student backgrounds. We suggest creating a competition among student teams to potentiate creativity while leveraging the SDR development methodology and open-source tools to facilitate cooperation. The proposed student challenge follows the European UEFA Champions League format, which includes a qualification phase followed by the elimination round or playoffs. The students are tasked to build an SDR transmitter and receiver following the guidelines of the long-term evolution standard. The metric is system performance. After completing this course, the students will be able to (1) analyze alternative radio design options and argue about their benefits and drawbacks and (2) contribute to the evolution of wireless standards. We discuss our experiences and lessons learned with particular focus on the suitability of the proposed teaching and evaluation methodology and conclude that competition in the electrical engineering classroom can spur innovation.Comment: Frontiers in Education 2018 (FIE 2018

Low-cost Printable Robots in Education

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0199-xThe wider availability of 3D printing has enabled small printable robots (or printbots) to be incorporated directly into engineering courses. Printbots can be used in many ways to enhance lifelong learning skills, strengthen understanding and foster teamwork and collaboration. The experiences outlined in this paper were used in our teaching during the last academic year, although much of the methodology and many of the activities have been used and developed over the past 8 years. They include project based assignments carried out by multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, a number of theoretical and practical classroom and laboratory activities all aimed at familiarizing students with fundamental concepts, programming and simulation, and which now form part of our regular robotics courses, and some brief descriptions of how printable robots are being used by students carrying out final projects for Bachelor and Master degrees. The online resources show many of these activities in action.Armesto Ángel, L.; Fuentes-Durá, P.; Perry, DR. (2016). Low-cost Printable Robots in Education. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. 81(1):5-24. doi:10.1007/s10846-015-0199-xS524811Criteria for accrediting engineering programs (Unknown Month 2015, 2014). http://www.abet.org/eac-criteria-2014-2015Board, N.S.: Moving forward to improve engineering education (2007). http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsb07122/nsb07122.pdfCampion, G., Bastin, G., d’Andréa Novel, B.: Structural properties and classification of kinematic and dynamic models of wheeled mobile robots. IEEE Trans. Robot. Autom. 12(1), 47–62 (1996)Carberry, A.R., Lee, H.-S., Ohland, M.W.: Measuring engineering design self-efficacy. J. Eng. Educ. 99(1), 71–79 (2010)Castro. A.: Robotic arm with 6 dof (2012). http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30163Choset, H., Lynch, K.M., Hutchinson, S., Kantor, G.A., Burgard, W., Kavraki, L.E., Thrun, S.: Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations. MIT Press, Cambridge MA (2005)d’Andréa Novel, B., Campion, G., Bastin, G.: Control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots by state feedback linearization. Int. J. Robot. Res. 14(6), 543–559 (1995)Denavit, J., Hartenberg, R.S.: A kinematic notation for lower-pair mechanisms based on matrices. Trans. ASME J. Appl. Mech 22(2), 215–221 (1955)Dowdall. J.: Rofi robot five (2012). http://www.projectbiped.com/prototypes/rofiEliot, M., Howard, P., Nouwens, F., Stojcevski, A., Mann, L., Prpic, J., Gabb, R., Venkatesan, S., Kolmos, A.: Developing a conceptual model for the effective assessment of individual student learning in team-based subjects. Australas. J. Eng. Educ. 18(1), 105–112 (2012)Fox, D., Burgard, W., Thrun, S.: The dynamic window approach to collision avoidance. Robot. Autom. Mag. IEEE 4(1), 23–33 (1997)Fuentes-Dura, P., Armesto, L., Perry, D.: Multidisciplinary projects: Critical points and perceptions in valladolid in innovation and quality in engineering education. In: Innovation and Quality in Engineering Education, pp 315–331 (2012)Fuentes-Dura, P., Cazorla, M.P., Molina, M.G., Perry, D.: European project semester: Good practices for competence acquisition. In: Valencia Global, pp 165– 172 (2014)González, J., Barrientos, A., Prieto-Moreno, A., de Frutos, M.A.: Miniskybot 2 (2012). http://www.iearobotics.com/wiki/index.php?Miniskybot_2Gonzalez-Gomez, J., Valero-Gomez, A., Prieto-Moreno, A., Abderrahim, M.: A new open source 3d-printable mobile robotic platform for education. In: Rckert, U., Joaquin, S., Felix, W. (eds.) Advances in Autonomous Mini Robots, pp 49–62. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (2012)Gonzlez, J., Wagenaar, R. (eds.): Tuning Educational Structures in Europe University of Deusto and Groningen. Deusto (2003)Heinrich, E., Bhattacharya, M., Rayudu, R.: Preparation for lifelong learning using eportfolios. Eur. J. Eng. Educ. 32(6), 653–663 (2007)Khatib, O.: Real-time obstacle avoidance for manipulators and mobile robots. The Int. J. Robot. Res. 5(1), 90–98 (1986)Krassman, J.: Quadcopter hummingbird ii (2013). http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:167721Langevin, G.: Inmoov (2012). http://www.inmoov.frMadox: ecanum wheel rover 2 (2011). http://www.madox.net/blog/2011/01/24/mecanum-wheel-rover-2Miles, M.B., Analysis, A.M.: Huberman. Qualitative Data: An Expanded Sourcebook. SAGE Publications (1994)Minguez, J., Montano, L.: Nearness diagram (nd) navigation: Collision avoidance in troublesome scenarios. IEEE Trans. Robot. Autom. 20, 2004 (2004)Olalla: Caterpillator v1.1 (2011). http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8559Ollero, A.: Robótica. Manipuladores y robots móviles Marcombo, S.A. Barcelona (2001)Price, M.: Hf08 hexapod robot (2012). http://www.heliumfrog.com/hf08robot/hf08blog.htmlRawat, K., Massiha, G.: A hands-on laboratory based approach to undergraduate robotics education. In: Proceedings of 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2, pp 1370–1374 (2004)Robotics, C.: Virtual experimentation robotic platform (v-rep) (2013). www.coppeliarobotics.comScott, B.: Principles of problem and project based learning the aalborg model. Aalbord University (2010)Teichler, U., Schonburg, H.: editors. Comparative Perspectives on Higher Education and Graduate Employment and Work Experiences from Twelve Countries. Kluwer Pub. (2004)Ulrich, I., Borenstein, J.: Vfh+: reliable obstacle avoidance for fast mobile robots. In: Robotics and Automation, 1998. Proceedings, volume 2, pp 1572–1577 (1998)Verner, I., Waks, S., Kolberg, E.: Educational robotics An insight into systems engineering. Eur. J. Eng. Educ. 24(2), 201–212 (1999)C.y.A. Vicerrectorado de Estudios: Dimensiones competenciales upv (2013). http://www.upv.es/contenidos/ICEP/info/DimensionesCompetenciales.pdfWampler, C.W.: Manipulator inverse kinematic solutions based on vector formulations and damped least squares methods. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man, Cybern. 16(1), 93–101 (1986)Weinberg, J., Yu, X.: Robotics in education Low-cost platforms for teaching integrated systems. Robot. Autom. Mag. IEEE 10(2), 4–6 (2003

QuadLab : a Project-Based Learning Toolkit for Automation and Robotics Engineering Education

It is frequently claimed that the students must have an active role in building and transforming their own knowledge, and the teacher's labor is to provide the students the necessary tools in order to reach specific learning objectives, included in a course program. This paper presents an aerial robotic system as a toolkit, and proposes a series of activities focused on the learning in automation and robotics. These proposed activities have been designed based upon the project-based learning methodology, and they facilitate the achievement of the learning objectives presented by Spanish automation committee(CEA) in conjunction with The International Society of Automation (ISA) to satisfy the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) standard. The toolkit and the activities are oriented to impulse the practical teaching, giving the student additional motivation and, in consequence, improving his or her active role. Besides, the toolkit and the activities give the teacher a tool in which it is possible to assess the students learning process.This work was supported by the Robotics and Cybernetics Group at Technical University of Madrid (Spain), and funded under the projects ROTOS: Multi-robot system for outdoor infrastructures protection, sponsored by SpainMinistry of Education and Science (DPI2010-17998), and ROBOCITY 2030, sponsored by the Community of Madrid (S-0505/DPI/000235)

Introducing autonomous vehicles into an unergraduate engineering course

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are of great interest for the automotive industry and are expected to revolutionize mobility and public transportation. The university can contribute to the design and development of autonomous vehicles both in the field of teaching and in research and technology transfer. In this paper, it is described how this topic is introduced in an undergraduate engineering course, “Implementation of Automatic Control Systems (IACS)”. The IACS course is based on project based learning (PBL) and learning by doing methodologies. Several practical examples that correspond to real automatic systems are discussed throughout the course and one of them, a low-cost AV to which a Raspberry pi has been adapted, forms the basis for a final project of the course. The control algorithms are developed on MATLAB/SIMULINK and are sent to the Raspberry through a wireless communication network. The control objective of the system is the automatic guidance of the vehicle through a single lane indoor closed circuit, the detection and identification of different traffic signals and the automatic response to these signals. Students check the behavior of the vehicle and proceed to make improvements. Based on the assessment of the students and the robustness of the autonomous vehicles, it is time to consolidate this type of project within the course. Students that want to get deeper into the matter have the opportunity to do a final degree project related with the AV

Systematic review on which analytics and learning methodologies are applied in primary and secondary education in the learning of robotics sensors

Robotics technology has become increasingly common both for businesses and for private citizens. Primary and secondary schools, as a mirror of societal evolution, have increasingly integrated science, technology, engineering and math concepts into their curricula. Our research questions are: “In teaching robotics to primary and secondary school students, which pedagogical-methodological interventions result in better understanding and knowledge in the use of sensors in educational robotics?”, and “In teaching robotics to primary and secondary school students, which analytical methods related to Learning Analytics processes are proposed to analyze and reflect on students’ behavior in their learning of concepts and skills of sensors in educational robotics?”. To answer these questions, we have carried out a systematic review of the literature in the Web of Science and Scopus databases regarding robotics sensors in primary and secondary education, and Learning Analytics processes. We applied PRISMA methodology and reviewed a total of 24 articles. The results show a consensus about the use of the Learning by Doing and Project-Based Learning methodologies, including their different variations, as the most common methodology for achieving optimal engagement, motivation and performance in students’ learning. Finally, future lines of research are identified from this study.This research was co-funded by the support of the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca of the Department of Business and Knowledge of the Generalitat de Catalunya with the help of 2017 SGR 93