The Covid-19 pandemic took everyone by surprise. To prevent the spread of the virus, changes had to be made in every sphere of life. In this article, the authors present a study on how this situation impacted the organisation of student workshops and exhibitions used to disseminate students' outcomes. The role of student workshops is to educate and facilitate students' development under the eye of experienced mentors. Intensive work in a strictly allotted time and a new creative environment have often led to workshop projects resulting in fully innovative solutions. Thus exhibitions of such projects have high value, both to the participant and visitors. The pandemic restrictions forced the workshops to be moved to the Internet. The authors, based on many years of experience and the results of a survey study, investigated the impact of these changes on the effectiveness of workshops and exhibitions. They analysed which solutions enhance the effectiveness, and hence could be used in a post-pandemic reality. The findings indicate that despite excellent on-line tools, real-life experiences and face-to-face methods remain the most effective solution in regard to workshops and exhibitions. © 2021 WIETE. All Rights Reserved.
The author of this article presents a systemic approach to improving the teaching of architectural drawing courses for engineers in the 21st Century. In this era of rapid development of digital technologies, the traditional teaching structure should be redefined to a purpose-oriented dynamic model. The existing, generally accepted teaching models have already proved successfully based on the practice-oriented STEAM programme, which integrates science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. The systemic approach proposed in the article is a step forward in the teaching model strongly focusing on the open structure of the model necessary for its future development in this changing environment. The usefulness of the proposed model for the improvement of teaching architectural drawing has been analysed along with the syllabus of the Architectural Drawing course in the Faculty of Architecture at Gdansk University of Technology, Gdansk, Poland. The results of on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions were processed by data analysis. The usefulness of the proposed model in different areas of engineering education is discussed in this article. © 2021 WIETE
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a shift to on-line teaching and enforced adjustments to academic curricula all over the world. It has also affected the teaching of participative landscape design within landscape architecture studies in the Faculty of Architecture at Cracow University of Technology (FA-CUT), Krakow, Poland. In this article, the authors summarise experiences from the Social Communication subject during the 4th and 5th semester of landscape architecture directly linked to integrated design studio. A number of methods facilitating public participation were tested and included on-line questionnaires, social media profiles, on-line focus group interviews and elements of gaming on a special Minecraft server. Results indicate that although on-line participation may be fruitful, it requires considerable efforts in terms of time and workload. Therefore, despite the promising results, on-line participation requires as much careful planning and time management as traditional social research methods. Nonetheless, the on-line tools have proven to be particularly useful and appropriate in times of social distancing in the pandemic. © 2021 WIETE
Traditionally, recursion is primarily taught using coding activities, presenting a high cognitive load for novice programmers. A possible method to teach recursion to novice programmers is the use of unplugged activities, engaging tasks not involving coding. Despite having been shown to improve students’ understanding of computational thinking, it has been argued that unplugged activities alone are not effective to teach recursion. In response, the authors engaged novice programmers who are non-computer science students by utilising unplugged visual activities to illustrate basic recursion concepts. Thereafter, the students were shown how to implement the activities with coding. The authors created three activities that illustrate recursion using breadth-first search (BFS) and depth-first search (DFS) algorithms. An evaluation study with 19 students was conducted in an on-line teaching environment. Empirical results show that most students learned the covered activities. Further, the students reported that the activities were engaging, and helped them learn how to think recursively.
Asynchronous on-line discussion boards (AODBs) have become a standard pedagogical tool, and the use of learning outcomes has become normalised in much of higher education, yet little is known about using AODBs to assess learning outcomes. Hence, this article aims to assess the degree to which students demonstrate learning outcomes attainment through participation in an AODB. The research method implemented is built around a particular AODB instrument designed to teach and assess cross-disciplinary learning outcomes. Using a sample group of 30 computing students studying at a public university in the United Arab Emirates, this article demonstrates that a well-designed and structured AODB can be used to teach and assess important cross-disciplinary learning outcomes, and that discussions can be assessed in an efficient manner. By examining both student group and learning outcome scores, results indicate that students showed improvement in learning outcomes attainment across a semester. Given the recent growth in on-line learning, this study supports the need for more research into the use of AODBs as a method to teach and assess learning outcomes.
