This paper was presented at the 2008 Engineering Conference - Innovation Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education.
In engineering education modelling is one of the critical skills that students need to acquire. Models are used to help representing complex processes or systems in a way that overview and understanding of a particular aspect of these processes or systems is created. Hence models need to be constructed in such a way that information and understanding from a complex reality can be reduced into a pragmatic assessment on the project level.
In modelling education we find a paradox. The endresult of a modelling exercise is by definition a less complex representation of the system or process that is studied. Therefore when providing examples of a modelling effort the true complexity of the analysis and modeling task is often underestimated. Consequently studying worked out examples of a modelling task or witnessing a teacher during a modelling effort is insufficient to learn how to analyse and to model a system or a process. The difficulty of the task is only experienced and understood when students try to model by themselves. However this is difficult to accomplish in a classroom setting as experience showed in engineering curriculums.
In this study we tested a new method for a modelling lab; a semistructured interactive workshop in which students work in groups on large whiteboards using flexible modelling blocks. We evaluated the method using a questionnaire and compared the final grades of the participating students with the students that did not participate. The results are encouraging.
