Experiential learning at home in an engineering thermodynamics course

Abstract

The teaching-learning process in an Engineering thermodynamics course benefits from laboratory components as experiential learning activities. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic brought difficulties for the use of experiential learning in lab-based topics. This work describes the results from implementing an at-home non-traditional laboratory, where the students had to design and build a prototype to conduct experiments and analyse results. Results indicate positive learning outcomes and both acceptance and satisfaction from the students; the students had a mean mark of 89.22; comparatively, the previous year in-person overall mean mark was 87.98. Moreover, from a conducted student experience survey, in terms of overall satisfaction, the obtained score was 9 out of 10, while when the module was taught in-person the average score was 9.1.