(158a) A Simple and Effective Strategy to Motivate Students When Teaching Technical and Economical Analysis in Engineering Programmes

Since 1999, I have been teaching a semiannual course in alternate semesters on Technical and Economical Analysis to undergraduate students of the Chemical Engineering School at the State University of Campinas (Brazil), one of the largest universities in South America. After teaching this course for three years, I decided that I could not stand anymore the fact that when I started talking about investment equivalence analysis involving interest rates and inflation, several of the students almost slept or just left the classroom, despite all my efforts. It seemed that the subject was not mathematically complex enough for them to worry about. I noticed that most of the students were aloof from Brazil's economical and political situation, and the same applied to global economy. Interestingly, the aloofness seemed to be even stronger among the female students. Motivated by the students' lack of motivation, I established a series of seminars to be given by the students as one of the components of their final grade. However, the choice of the seminar theme was a student responsibility and would strongly count on that activity grade, as would the presentation itself referring to total communication effectiveness (written text and figures as well as oral performance), aiming to also prepare the students for the many panel presentations required when competing for technical training positions. The seminar theme selection by itself provoked a remarkable increase on students' motivation beginning in class one, since they had to select from a large universe of possibilities a topic that should be closely related to the course (but not necessarily involving a chemical process) and simultaneously interesting to their fellow colleagues (sometimes, part of the grading process involved the other students opinion). The results of employing this simple strategy for the last five years in classes varying from 34 to 66 students will be discussed, for total grade percentages exclusively due to this activity varying from 5 to 10%. Seminar type (individual, in couples or in larger groups) and duration (5 to 15 minutes) had to be adapted to the characteristics of the classes. A variety of themes was efficiently covered, ranging from different choices of savings-type bank investments to preliminary evaluation of a biodiesel production plant economical feasibility.