IMPACT OF PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING IN THE LECTURING OF MECHATRONIC ENGINEERS AT THE NATIONAL AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO

In the School of Engineering of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) there is an academic space known as Open Robotics Workshop, in which, professors and students participate developing robotics, mechatronics and artificial intelligence projects with which it is intended to enhance the training quality of graduates. The Open Robotics Workshop is the place where the institutional project "Mobile robots for the recognition and inspection of areas with restricted mobility" is carried out, under the Program of Support for Research and Technological Innovation Projects", PAPIIT by its acronym in Spanish, of which its main goal is: "... create an interdisciplinary group of academics, undergraduate and post graduate students whom will perform social service and theses develop solving specific problems of the project according to methodologies of problem-based learning that foster a solid and significant academic formation." The theoretical structures for the project are based on constructivism and constructionism, which are the pillars in which problem-based learning (PBL) is supported, which recently has taken great importance in formal education, because of its advantages over the called traditional working methods due to the results obtained. The approach to the problems of this project is based on design methodologies applied to mechatronics such as those proposed by Ullman and Ulrich, as well as production and assembly methodologies such as those proposed by Kanban and Boothroyd, and for the design control components and software architectures, agile software development SCRUM-based methodologies have been used, which have given good results. There are two purposes of this article: first one, to describe the way the PBL is applied in the Open Robotics Workshop, the benefits obtained by the students, teachers and the institution itself, and the strengths and weaknesses that have been detected through time; the second one, show the results of a survey applied to graduates, employers and researchers who are directly related to those graduates on the Mechatronic Engineering career, of the aforementioned School of Engineering, on the influence of the PBL used as a didactic strategy in their professional training and improvement of their performance in the workplace. The participants expressed their opinion regarding the quality of the engineers graduated from UNAM who developed projects during their studies, comparing them with those trained under the traditional teaching approach; likewise, they described the capacity shown by the graduates when they have to work on individual, group and/or entrepreneurship projects. From the analysis of the information obtained, it can be seen that the PBL helped to train engineers with greater confidence and methodological knowledge to approach projects, with the ability to work collaboratively by sharing information with their colleagues, in a way that makes it easier for them to lead their work groups. In addition, it provides information that feeds the permanent improvement and transcendence of the application of non-traditional teaching strategies used in the training of engineers. It is concluded that the application of the PBL in the Open Robotics Workshop has been successful from the point of view of training excellent engineering professionals and proposes ideas that could improve their deficiencies to consolidate their impact on the quality of their participants.