Abstract
A summary of the personal investment in teaching fluid mechanics over 40 years in a French university is presented. Learning and Teaching Science and Engineering has never been easy, and in recent years it has become a crucial challenge for curriculum developers and teaching staff to offer attractive courses and optimized assessments. One objective is to ensure that students acquire competitive skills in higher science education that enable them to compete in the employment market, as the mechanical field is a privileged sector in industry. During the last decade, classical learning and teaching methods have been coupled with hands-on practice for future schoolteachers in a specific course on subjects including fluid mechanics. The hands-on/minds-on/hearts-on approach has demonstrated its effectiveness in training primary school teachers, and fluids are certainly a nice source of motivation for pupils in science learning. In mechanical engineering, for undergraduate and graduate students, the development of teaching material and the learning and teaching experience covers up to 40 years, mostly on fluid dynamics and related topics. Two periods are identified, those prior to and after the Bologna Process. Most recently, teaching instruction has focused on the Fluid Mechanics Concept Inventory (FMCI). This inventory has been recently introduced in France, with some modifications, and remedial tools have been developed and are proposed to students to remove misconceptions and misunderstandings of key concepts in fluid mechanics. The FMCI has yet to be tested in French higher education institutions, as are the innovative teaching methods that are emerging in fluid mechanics.
Highlights
The present paper summarizes a 40 year learning and teaching experience in a French university, with the occasional assistance of foreign professors on sabbatical and on-the-job learning that took place in the mid-1970s
It is based on the hands-on/minds-on method coupled with constructivism, science learning, inquiry-based problems, hypothetico-deductive (HD) reasoning, methods of observation, initial representation, verification by experimentation, and feedback
For a given problem related to an available theoretical structure, we present the following items: Fluids 2019, 4, x
Summary
The present paper summarizes a 40 year learning and teaching experience in a French university, with the occasional assistance of foreign professors on sabbatical and on-the-job learning that took place in the mid-1970s. Over the last 15 years, learning how fluids behave based on hands-on methods was shown to be a challenge for future school professors [1]. The development of computer science, the internet, and innovative pedagogical methods in learning and teaching science (SoTL, [4]) will bring to light that novel methods are needed to persuade students to pursue the subject of fluids in their studies in higher science education, as well as to improve young people’s interest in science studies and attract them to fluid mechanical engineering and related professions. A short review of recent innovative teaching and learning methods applied to fluids completes the paper, with the goal of encouraging collaboration with young colleagues
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