A CASE STUDY OF A PROJECT BASED LEARNING ACTIVITY IMPLEMENTED IN A GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING COURSE

Abstract

Today’s industry employers are looking for graduate civil engineers that not only have acquired strong and sound technical and scientific knowledge but also should they have good problem-solving, team-work, writing and communication skills among others. At present, civil engineering programs and courses are mainly delivered using traditional teaching methods that have been proved to provide a good technical, scientific and engineering knowledge among their graduates. However, in most cases, there is a lack of practical and design experience as well as a low development of the previously mentioned personal abilities in their graduates. Project based learning (PBL) strategy has been proved to be effective addressing most of the shortcomings presented before in engineering courses. Thus, in this context, one PBL activity has been introduced as part of a geotechnical engineering course within the civil engineering degree. A mixed strategy of traditional teaching and PBL has been chosen not to sacrifice the scientific, technical and engineering fundamentals knowledge. The implemented PBL activity involves the design of a small-scale deep foundation prototype, that will be printed in 3D and subsequently, it will be tested in the laboratory. This paper precisely describes the PBL activity, together with the perception of the experience from the point of view of the students involved.