Multidisciplinary Projects for First Year Engineering Courses Carmen Escribano Antonio Giraldo Águeda Mata María Asunción Sastre cescribano@fi.upm.es ABSTRACT agiraldo@fi.upm.es agueda@fi.upm.es masastre@fi.upm.es Computer Science School, Technical University of Madrid, Boadilla del Monte, 28660 Madrid, Spain technology [1] has been given to the students, for them to choose. Due to its bigger workload, some projects were intended for the two semesters of the course. At the Computer Science School of Technical University of Madrid, the mathematics courses that the students must take in their first university year are œDiscrete Mathematics  (first semester), Linear Algebra (second semester) and Calculus (both semesters). The proposal of the projects, as well as their evaluation, has been done coordinately by the teachers of the mathematics courses of a given group of students. The accomplishment of the work is made through several deliveries: initial work plan (in the second week), middle memory (in the seventh week), final memory (in the thirteenth week) and oral presentation (fourteenth week). The final presentation is done outside the hours of class in a single session, in the way a scientific or technical conference is done. All the teachers and students attend this session, and each group of students presents the work made by them in a random way. In this work we will expose some proposals directed to the development of horizontal skills in the first year courses of Mathematics for Computer Science, with the purpose of stimulating the curiosity and the interest of the students by means of collaborative work. Our experience is based on the planning of multidisciplinary activities following projects based learning (PBL) pedagogies, included in the joint educational planning of the mathematics courses in first year of Computer Science. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION]: Computer Uses in Education - Collaborative learning. General Terms Documentation, Human Factors, Theory. Keywords Multidisciplinary collaborative work, horizontal capacities, PBL. 3. CONCLUSION The experience has been very rewarding. In a group with 25 first year students, 21 (all those that have attended class regularly) made a project in the first semester, although it only supposes at most a 10% of the final mark. Moreover, a new group of three students which have not made the first semester project have decided to do one for the second semester. The results of this experience, as well as the analysis of a survey which has been made, would be presented at the conference. On the other hand, with this single experience, we have verified how the students of first year have developed numerous capacities when making this work: collaborative work, oral communication, written expression, use of new technologies, information management ¦ Moreover, according to the students ™ answers to the opinion poll, the project has contributed to gain a deeper understanding of the courses, to increase self-direction and motivation, to improve research and problem-solving skills, and to better understand how theoretical knowledge, technology and everyday life are deeply related. 1. INTRODUCTION As we approach the European Higher Education Area, we have to motivate students to change its way of learning, stimulating him to take a more active part in it. According to our experience, it is necessary to give students the leading role in their formation which they have had not in traditional education, due mainly to the lack of means and too crowded classes. Nowadays, coinciding with the implantation of the European Higher Education Area, the classes tend to be more reduced. This fact, together with the improvement in the means available to teachers, related to technological aspects and to information access, has provided an appropriate frame to design and develop new formative activities. 2. DESCRIPTION OF THE WORK In the last years there has been an increasing literature on projects based learning techniques applied to all kind of studies (see [3] for a review of PBL experiences prior to 2000 and [2] for a more recent work). The experience that we are developing is inspired in these PBL techniques. However, since it is referred to a first University course, the scope is more reduced. Instead of basing all the learning throughout the course on projects, we have only assigned the students a single multi-disciplinary project for each semester. At the beginning of each semester, a list of several project proposals related to different areas of mathematics connected with everyday Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ITiCSE ™08, June 30 “July 2, 2008, Madrid, Spain. ACM 978-1-60558-115-6/08/06. 4.

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