The Science Education Outreach Program at PUC-Rio: its Implications to the University's Engineering Education Reform

BORGES, Hortencio A.

Rua Marques de Sao Vicente, 225 - Gavea, RJ 22453-900 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Department of Physics, Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, hborges@fis.puc-rio.br, http://www.fis.puc-rio.br/piues

1 Introduction

The often-quoted problems facing many Universities and Engineering courses motivated a group of physicists at PUC-Rio to create the PIUES project: declining enrollment in the University-s Technical-Scientific courses, substantial fraction of entering students with serious Physics and Math background deficiencies, non-negligible number of students dropping out after the first semesters of the course, low motivation for technical-scientific careers, among others. Believing that the University could, and should, face those issues at an earlier stage than the official enrollment by the students, some activities were chosen. Timid at first, and engaging in progressively bolder actions as the external acceptance and repercussion assured us of being in a right path, that project has evolved to include an increasing number of activities, partnerships, and university students.

The first set of those activities designed to face those issues, aimed at trying to motivate the secondary school students to science learning through a number of laboratory sessions, initially in our physics teaching labs, in their idle hours, and later in a specially designed lab at the University, while stimulating their teachers to utilize experiments in their daily work (an attitude seldom seem in our country). The repercussions and acceptance of those activities led to our program being honored with a national award [1], in 1994.

Over the following years, an increasing number of visits by secondary school students led to the devising of new means to carry on the laboratory sessions: that was achieved by the reactivation of the teacher formation course at the Physics department. Courses normally taken by students aiming at becoming science teachers (a species in extinction) saw an increase in registration by engineering majors, who at one time found great interest in participating in the laboratory sessions, and simultaneously brought new ideas into the project [2].

Starting in 1996, PIUES offered its first secondary school teacher-s training course, which included, among several other resources, the production and distribution of lab material to those teachers.

By that time, the breadth of contacts and activities had enlarged substantially, so that new forms of actions had been initiated: among those we highlight the active partnership with the Brazilian State Electrical Energy Research Center that led to the construction of a "Solar House" [3]; participation in the Brazilian Program of Engineering Education Reform; a partnership with the Brazilian Institute of Standards for the creation of an introductory course on Metrology and Industrial Quality for secondary school students; participation in the conceptualization of an Interactive Science Museum in Rio de Janeiro; and its pivotal role in a newly started special program that aims at allowing practicing Engineers to become Physics teachers.

We next describe, in some detail, the scope and relevance of those activities, and hope to demonstrate that its varied range has had a positive impact over our combined goals of engaging engineering students in new aspects of theirs professional formation, as well as bridging a gap between the University and the pre-university courses.

2 Project Description

2.1 Laboratory Visits

The seminal aspect of the PIUES project has been the reception of secondary school students in a specially devised laboratory, in which they may realize experiments in various areas of Physics - optics, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, mechanics, and so on - and participate in demonstrations. We situate the scope and approach of those experiments half-way between conventional laboratory ones, and the approach taken by interactive science centers (of which Brazil is special in need for), while trying to make, as much as possible, those experiments and demonstrations relate to the daily experience of the students.

In the early days of our project, the project had to rely, for its functioning, on the work of volunteer Physics Department professors and graduate students to conduct those visits, which had, as a starting point, the experiments of our own undergraduate Physics teaching laboratories.

It soon became clear that the public we had targeted fast exceeded the structure upon which we counted, and we proceeded to prepare a laboratory specifically for the project. At the same time, we began experimenting a shortage of instructors as the number of visitors kept increasing. A way of facing that shortage was to attract undergraduate Physics majors (bachelor-guided students) to act as instructors. That was achieved by giving them credit in courses originally created for students that would become Physics teachers (total number equal one, from 1988 through 1994), and allowing them to obtain that second degree together with their bachelor-s one (after we began that procedure, all Bachelor majors in Physics consistently participate in the project and obtain a second degree in teaching.

We then discovered that those students, while seeking a career in Physics as future researchers, also found a stimulating atmosphere where to exercise and reinforce their own understanding of Physics concepts while practicing talking to the public and teaching them their trade. That teaching practice, while necessary for most physicists in their future academic careers, is rarely encouraged in regular Physics courses. Therefore, we managed to accomplish several goals at the same time, being able to expand the number of visitors to our institution. It is also worth mentioning here the contribution to the institutional image that such project began to give. Table 1 below summarizes the statistics for the semesters since 1992 (numbers after the dot mean, 1- first semester, 2- second semester). We note here that those numbers are lower limits (attendance actually registered), since sometimes instructors fail to report the actual attendance in their sessions. In spite of that, we can firmly affirm a number of secondary school students equal to at least 800 per semester.

Table 1. Attendance to the Laboratory sessions over the semesters

It is important to notice that the numbers above where reached in a context in which the project participants maintained their primary academic concerns, teaching and research, that is, conducting the project in their "spare hours".

We have noticed, over the years, that many secondary school visitors have later enrolled in PUC-s technical-scientific careers, and several, among those, have also become instructors in the project, which attests to its motivational potential. Some have already graduated and maintain ties with the project coordinators.

2.2 Teacher-s training courses

A byproduct of the activities summarized above had their start from the teachers reactions to those visits: over the years, an increasing number of those brought to us some of their needs and requests, regarding their teaching experiences. Those ranged from a lack of laboratory resources in the vast majority of schools, to their own deficiencies, especially in more contemporary science themes, which led to frequent problems in their daily practices.

That led us to devise training courses for them, professionals who have their own set of limitations: little free time, scarce (when not totally inexistent) official school support, harsh financial conditions, since teachers in Brazil face severe wage limitations, to name only a few. We then submitted a proposal to a government agency, proposing activities during school vacations, contemplating a modest daily allowance, and support for constructing kits of experiments, which were donated to the participating teachers.

While contemplating the standard Physics topics, we strongly introduced lectures, research laboratory visits and participations, and other activities, aiming at bringing those teachers in closer contact with contemporary issues, like physics and astronomy, including satellites deployment and their use for communications, Physics and society, semiconductor physics, from their preparation to device construction (like lasers and telecommunications), superconductivity, low temperature physics, and photovoltaic cells. For those, we counted both with the support of research labs at PUC, the Planetary of the city of Rio de Janeiro, and other research centers.

Those courses had great success with the teachers, as well as with some of those research centers, leading, once again, to another set of activities, which will be described below. We finalize this section by stating that the teachers that have participated in those courses have become more assiduous visitors at PIUES, and divulgators of the project to other colleagues.

2.3 Some relevant offsprings to Engineering Education

During the first of those training courses we devised a set of lectures on the topic of Renewable Energy Sources and Energy Efficiency, conducted by researchers at the Brazilian Electrical Energy Research Center (CEPEL), followed by visits to their laboratory. Although not a new theme, it became clear that the teachers lacked almost all information about the subject, even when that Research Center had been conducting socially relevant works in our country. The intense response of those teachers to that activity motivated us - at PIUES and at CEPEL - to conceptualize and execute a new subproject: the construction of a house fully functional on the basis of Solar Energy, that should become an object of visitation by students and teachers, and help propagate the basics of clean, renewable energies, and energy efficiency.

That was, indeed, built at CEPEL-s campus, and has, in addition, become a center for the realization of other training courses, not only for teachers, but also for other professionals (architects, engineers, among others). A detailed account of that collaboration was presented in ICEE98 [3].

At the same time, the city of Rio de Janeiro decided to invest in the construction of a new Planetary, next to PUC-s campus, within a complex that should also house an interactive science museum (Espaco Museu do Universo), and invited PIUES-s staff to be a participant on the conceptualization of the pedagogical content of that. That generated a new opportunity to expand our ties and both learn and contribute to bringing science topics to students and the general public. That new project has been inaugurated in September 1998, and has already strengthened the ties with our university, as will be described further ahead.

2.4 Expanding the Scope with Engineering Students

While the new ties above were forged, we kept witnessing an increasing demand for the lab visits at the PIUES lab. More ideas and resources were needed, and we saw an opportunity to address those issues in the recently created Brazilian Program for the Reform of Engineering Education (REENGE). We presented two subprojects, aiming at two of the targets that program had identified: University/K-12 initiatives, and the emphasis on so-called "hands-on" approaches.

In the first set we obtained a number of stipends for engineering students to participate in PIUES both as monitors, and also to develop other lab resources, like videos, laboratory manuals, animations, and a web site that aims at letting all the material available for students and teachers alike. That subproject also allowed for acquiring a number of laboratory equipments, thus expanding the number and scope of the experiments and demonstrations conducted during the sessions.

At the same time, we saw the beginning of a new phenomena: engineering students began taking the same courses as the Physics majors, which had for them the same benefits as for the latter group. That new group allowed us to cross inter-departmental borders, and initiate hands-on projects, in the context the of the REENGE program. Therefore, we have been advising some groups of students in their development of products that will demonstrate some uses of solar energy, and will be a part of the visitation of the "Solar House": a system of indoor illumination, bringing sunlight through optical fibers, an ice-making machine, based on an ammonia cycle, and utilizing solar energy, and a solar-energy powered demonstration car.

The students participating in the above projects come from the Mechanical, Electrical and Chemical Engineering departments, and are co-advised by researchers at PUC and at CEPEL. The projects are near their conclusion.

2.5 New Cross-Department Projects

Aside from the above related activities, we also realized that some of the Engineering majors could, on one hand, benefit from the presencial laboratory sessions, and on the other, utilize our resources to fulfill some graduation requirements in their original fields of interest.

More specifically, some of the students began to elaborate their mandatory graduation projects (as per their department rules) within PIUES-s framework. Those are co-advised by professors at those departments, which attests to their perception of relevance for their students formation. As examples, we mention here a project to be presented to the Computer Science department that incorporates the concept of Data Warehousing within PIUES-s site, allowing for a large flexibility and breadth of offerings to that site visitors.

A second one, to be presented to the same department, which is the actual structure of a new site for the PIUES project, and that has a starting point, two web-oriented tools [4], [5], both developed at the Computer Science Department at PUC-Rio, and named CGI-LUA and OOHDMWEB. This later project is the object of a paper submitted [2] to the International Conference on Engineering and Computer Education, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, next august. We will present its main features on-line, during the ICEE-99.

We have also engaged students from the Industrial Design department in our project, but those developments, still in progress, will be related in a later publication.

In addition, the active participation of the PIUES team both in the Solar House and in the Science Center next door to PUC-s campus has led to those institutions becoming active partners with PUC-s Science-Technology Center (CTC), for a newly devised course, named Introductory Physics. That course is offered to all entering engineering students that have scored what we consider below the acceptable level that should allow them to successfully face the first semesters of their courses.

The University has solid evidence that those students are serious candidates to evasion, after a few unsuccessful attempts at taking the initial courses. Therefore, a joint effort is being made by the CTC faculty, to give those students an opportunity to correct their deficiencies during that course, which makes extensive use of the above resources, among others.

3 Conclusions

We have briefly narrated a number of implications of the PIUES Science Education Outreach Program at PUC-Rio to Engineering Education. It is apparent that the number of activities already in place, and of new ones are legion. Perhaps one of the main aspects of the PIUES project is that it has been conducted as an open-system, being capable to accept, test and put in practice a host of ideas brought by the wide variety of its users. Certainly, one of its aspects deserves mention in the current context of rapid and drastic changes for the academic world of Engineers: the possibility of exercising creativity and entrepreneurship by the participating students.

Those aspects should be maintained, and extended to include a broader range of engineering educators, at our institution, while treasuring the ties already forged with both Science Centers, and Research Centers. We expect to increase the number of participants, at the coordination level, in he PIUES project, in the near future. It is, therefore, clear, that PIUES has a pivotal role to play in order to try and solve at least some of the problems engineering education institutions currently face.

References

[1] Top Educational Award, instituted by the Brazilian Association of Higher Education Institutions (Assoc. Brasil. de Mantenedoras de Ensino Superior), Brasilia, January 1994.

[2] P.H.FERRARI and H.A.BORGES. A Novel Web-based Approach Integrating Engineering and Computer Education, and a K-12 Initiative. To be presented at the International Conference on Engineering and Computer Education, ICECE99, Rio de Janeiro, August 11-14, 1999.

[3] H.M.DESOUZA, M.MOSZKOWICZ, J.C.AGUIAR, M.A.GALDINO, A.L.DESA, P.BEZERRA & HORTENCIO A.BORGES. A Strategy to Stimulate Technical Education in Renewable Energies and Energy Efficiency-CEPEL/PUC Cooperation. In International Conference on Engineering Education, ICEE98, Rio de Janeiro, August 17-20, 1998.

[4] R. IERUSALIMSCHY, L.H.DE FIGUEIREDO & W.CELES. Lua, an extensible extension language. Software: Practice & Experience 26 #6 (1996) 635-652.

[5] Cross-Platform Development and Portability. In location http://www.ddj.com/articles/1996/9612/, DDJ December 1996.