Survival Engineering and the Game of Knowledge: A Ludic Form of Teaching and Learning in Engineering

Abstract

Within the engineering pedagogy, it must be remembered that students learn in many different ways: seeing, hearing, thinking, acting, drawing analogies, and building mathematical models in the area of science and technology. This means that the student participates actively, appropriates it, and makes the experience a meaningful learning, transforming the process of teaching and learning into a dynamic interaction between the student and the teacher and/or between students, both inside and outside the classroom. This study provides an overview of the development of hard and soft skills in project-based curriculum planning in the context of engineering education, based on a ludic and motivational approach to teaching Geology—called the Student Contest of Survival Engineering (SCSE)—to students in the third year of a Civil Engineering career course. The purpose of this active methodology was to encourage students to develop both soft and hard skills, which were evaluated through practices conducted in the field with theoretical and technical activities. From the results obtained, it was concluded that the students had good expectations and felt fully motivated with respect to the skills they achieved. Similarly, it was evident that students had good intellectual capital but weak nontechnical skills and cooperative skills, impacting their ability to achieve the objectives of the course. This reinforces the need to implement both theoretical background knowledge and a basic science course as the common core of engineering.