Sinergias educativas
October - December Vol. 6 - 4 - 2021
http://sinergiaseducativas.mx/index.php/revista/
reports. In this way, decision making and autonomy in the different
processes that were carried out during this time were cemented. In
this aspect, decision making by the students becomes a requirement
to take ownership of the project and thus become more motivated by
its development (De- Graaff and Kolmos, 2007).
The method was implemented between 2012 and 2020, during which
time nearly one hundred and ninety projects were carried out with
students, with the guidance and collaboration of seven teachers from
different academic areas, the follow-up of nine monitors and the
support of five laboratorians, at different times, in the three
educational centers. In one specific case, there was the collaboration
of a monitor, who participated in the follow-up of about sixty
projects during three years. In this way, evidence could be collected
more effectively and the contribution of his participation in the
process could be established, based on the fact that he had experience
in the development of the method and in several subjects in which
the method was implemented. Surveys, interviews, workshops,
observation grids and a field diary were applied. The information
was triangulated and the results and conclusions presented in this
research were obtained.
In all cases, the students were motivated to explore their
environment to find engineering problems that they were interested
in investigating. In the few cases in which they did not find them,
the researcher presented a list of possible problems so that they could
take them from there. This covered the various fields of the
profession and each group had the autonomy to choose the topic they
thought best to develop the project. The projects followed the
methodology used in these university centers, from an excellent
construction of the problem, state of the art, elaboration of objectives
and theoretical framework, to methodology, schedule and budget
(Perico-Granados, Caro-Camargo et al., 2015), (Perico-Granados,
Garza et al., 2020). Likewise, the execution of the projects was
carried out with a variable duration, depending on the case.
In 90% of the projects, students were taken, with the guidance of
teachers and the accompaniment of monitors, to take field samples
of geotechnical, structural, water, or solid waste. In this way, they
had an approach to professional work, which was deepened with
laboratory tests and then with the analysis of the results. The teacher
guided them and the monitors, in the absence of the teacher, to
investigate in the books the concepts to put against the data obtained