Adoption of Experiential Learning Approach for Validation of Perpetual Motion Machine of First Kind Concept in Engineering Thermodynamics

Abstract

Educationalists among the globe are innovating and experimenting innovative teaching practices to the students to trigger students involvement, grasp of the concepts and performance. Engaging students in practical and challenging activities is one of the way to engage students in the learning process. The learning through inference drawn from these activities and experience is referred as an experiential learning. Experiential learning has evolved as a superior teaching-learning methodology over conventional classroom teaching. Autonomy in learning to the students and triggering creative thinking in students are the key aspects of experiential learning methodology. Educationalists have adopted experiential learning to science and technology, medical, management and engineering disciplines and is being more popular day by day. This article presents experiential learning model applied to engineering thermodynamics course (subject) for validation of basic thermodynamic concepts. Student validated working of a machine without any work input by reproducing the machine claimed in the videos uploaded on video sharing platforms. Flexible learning system helped students to have proper understanding of basic concepts, laws of thermodynamics and understanding and to improve academic performance. The activity conducted resulted in the improvement in the overall CO attainment by 14.12% along with improvement in the average marks of the students for UT1, UT2 and ESE assessment collectively by more than 55%. Keywords— Experiential learning; learning by doing; engineering thermodynamics; flexible learning framework.