La verbalización como método facilitador en la enseñanza de la Ingeniería en el contexto del proceso de Bolonia

Abstract

Today, Engineering Education requires that students acquire skills concerned with numerical simulation, for which other previous skills (that often they don‘t have) are mandatory. The credit rigidity doesn‘t allow the recovery of these skill shortcomings; so, it is normal the use of commercial simulation packages in educational developments, which leads to the black boxes. The black boxes abuse disrupts the teaching-learning process in the short and long term. In this work, we propose a conceptual form of verbalization, with the threefold purpose of preventing the indiscriminate use of black boxes, facilitate the teaching-learning process of the numerical simulation subject and improve the acquisition of specific skills in Engineering. The student knows the eidetic structure of simulation codes, but he doesn‘t learn its specific language; by contrast, uses the common language, i.e., verbalizes. The student designs the simulation and shows it in a verbalized manner, as an accurate and rigorous demand of the whole simulation process. If the verbalized demand is correct, the Tutor Facilitator translates the outlined problem to a programming language. This constructivist verbalization permits us to avoid the massive use of black boxes and then produces the conceptually consistent use of complex tools for numerical simulation.