A Hands-On Course for Five Hundred Students: Introduction to Engineering I at PUC-Rio.

This paper is a report on the teaching experiment conducted in the Introduction to Engineering I course at PUC-Rio's Technical-Scientific Center (CTC) during the two terms of 1997. The idea was to test and develop hands-on teaching methodology as set forth in "Hands-on Teaching and Concurrent Teaching: Relations and Difficulties" (Carmo and da Silveira, 1997), including principles of entrepreneurship development, following the educational policy recommended by the NSF (U.S.) and the REENGE program (Brazil) and applied at PUC-Rio's CTC. What makes this experiment original in comparison with other project courses is the number of students involved, as well as the strategies resorted to in order to use a hands-on approach on a large scale. The paper begins with a consideration of the problem to be faced: the number and type of students who enter the University, the teachers working on this course, and the equipment available. Then the organizational strategy is described, including the division of the students in groups of 60, each under the responsibility of a specific Department. Each Department interpreted the meaning of "hands-on" in its own way and developed its own strategy for working with a large number of students. These different strategies are analyzed and compared. The paper ends with the results of an evaluation that took into account the formal results, students' opinions of teachers and outside observers. The final result was positive, and the University officially adopted the new course. Older students requested the creation of a special course using the same methodology, so that their training might also profit from it. (Author)