Tractor Stability for Agricultural Engineering Students: Learning Through a Project-Based Task

Abstract

Most of the fatalities in the agricultural sector in developed countries are related to machinery use, particularly tractors overturning. Despite its importance, a lack of practical teaching about this topic has been detected in the Agricultural Engineering curricula. For this reason, an active learning activity was planned within a teaching-innovation project. The objective of this project was to design a structure as new teaching material to implement and use it to determine the tractor’s center of gravity coordinates. This teaching-innovation project was organized in two stages: 1) The design of proposals by students following previously established requirements, and 2) A practical exercise to analyze tractor stability. Each stage involved students from two different Agricultural Engineering degree subjects. Before the second stage, the professor performed the structure’s final design based on previous proposals and later built the structure. Five different ramp design proposals were received and graded in the first stage. A positive correlation between peer review and the professor’s grades was found. During the second stage, the ramps were used in another subject, in which the grades obtained in the related practical exercise were significantly higher than those in the previous year. However, no improvement was found in the final exam grades despite tasks in both stages complying with several general competencies required to pass each subject.