AN EXPERIENCE WITH THE APPLICATION OF PROJECT BASED LEARNING SUPPORTED BY DIFFERENT EDUCATIONAL METHODOLOGIES. RESULTS ON A REAL TIME SYSTEMS COURSE

In the context of the career of Computer Science, we have designed a course on Real Time Systems using a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach. This course is based on six educational methodologies. Our students have a quite limited time to develop the project, and consequently a main objective in the design of the course has been to take most advantage from every session programmed. For this purpose, we selected the most appropriate methodology for each project stage. The educational methodologies have been chosen according to the work that students needed to do at each stage of the project. Besides the planning of activities, we established several mechanisms to compile information on the course development. The information compiled comes from different sources, so that it complements the results and allows to test them. Students considered useful the different methodologies and pointed out some improvements in cross skills. The design of the course has been effective and reaches the goal of supporting PBL development. However, the analysis of the results allowed us to detect some lacks in the time of study and showed the convenience of opening more sessions dedicated to some methodologies like oral presentations and lab sessions