Enhancing Engineering Education Through Pedagogical Change: “Application to Abstract

Abstract

Students' understanding and capacity to apply and integrate principles from different units in each course are not being sufficed by the traditional teaching method, especially for the core courses. This research proposes a method, namely, “Application to Abstract” in which students learn the course by solving an application that draws on principles from various topics. The implementation of the same has been demonstrated with the help of a core course on Fluid Mechanics where a single problem statement with all the necessary information is defined and students work on the different aspect of the problem with the progress of the course. Compared to traditional method, more percentage of students showed interest in derivation of abstract principles (60%), the ability to apply the concepts (40%), ability to correlate with the basic principles and execute the project (50%). Their ability to comprehend and integrate the abstract concepts through the practical application has also enhanced their participation in laboratory classes.