An Education 4.0 Pedagogical Approach for Introducing Smart Manufacturing to 5th grade students

• Autor(a) principal: Leonor Ramos do Bem Cónego
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/135653
• topic: Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias; Other engineering and technologies

This research is developed within the scope of the European project "ShapiNG" (Shaping the next Generation of Manufacturing Professionals), whose main goal is to attract young students for activities in the field of manufacturing. Providing students with learning experiences that help them to understand the skills they need to succeed in the workplace is a difficult proposition in today's quickly changing world pervaded by technology. The purpose of this study is to identify key technologies and approaches that combined may constitute a suitable pedagogical architecture to create awareness and motivation among young students as to inspire them to pursue a career in Engineering. Drawing on David Ausubel's theory of learning, a case study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the conceived architecture. The research methodology population consisted of 60 students from the 5th grade attending the "STEM" class at "Escola Global". The covered topics were 3D modeling and 3D printing. After a thorough literature review and an in-depth fieldwork involving both direct and participant observation, questionnaires and interviews were done in order to collect data regarding the (a) knowledge obtained on the covered topics, (b) benefits of working collaboratively and individually, (c) effectiveness of the instructional material, and (d) motivation to pursue a career in Engineering. Ultimately, through our research we were able to obtain the following main results: there are no significant differences on the acquired knowledge between individual and collaborative work for the proposed activities; benefits of collaborative work are related to the possibility of negotiating concepts and enhancing leadership and organizational skills, whilst benefits of individual work are related to the possibility of self-overcoming and being creative; motivation influenced the perceived quality of instructional material with motivated students rating better the instructional material than the unmotivated ones; male students are more motivated to pursue a career in Engineering than female. Ultimately, the main results of this study provide a conceptual and practical gateway to bring in effective approaches to future research and activities focused on motivating young students to pursue a career in Engineering.