ENGINEERING STUDENTS' PERCEPTION ON WORKSHOP-BASED LEARNING FOR DESIGN AND MATERIALS SELECTION

There remains a consensus that universities are not producing industry-oriented professionals who can play an active role in shaping today's society. This is thought to be due to the traditional learning environment, where students are merely passive learners having insufficient opportunities to integrate knowledge in real-life problems. Students in such environments have difficulties in linking theory/principles with practice. As an initiative to correct this, the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at the National University of Singapore introduced work-based learning (WBL) to teach "Design and Materials selection" at level 1000. Students were given semi-structured engineering problems. Students worked in small groups to define the engineering problem based on the market need and client requirements, including aspects beyond the technical domains; such as cost, environmental impact and aesthetics. In addition, CES EduPack was introduced to acquaint students with how software aids materials and process selection in industry. Students were evaluated based on presentations at the end of each studio session. A survey conducted at the end of the semester with 90 participants found that >80% of students felt the WBL pedagogical approach promoted collaborative learning. Students were of the view that receiving real-time feedback as a useful method, which stimulate their performance and participation in studio sessions. However, students had a split opinion on having traditional lectures over student-centric studio sessions, though 70% of them thought studio sessions were more beneficial in learning, they felt it represented an additional workload and benefited more vocal students than introvert ones.