Make Students Confident in Thermodynamics: The Project Based Learning Methodology

The traditional teaching method, lecture-based learning, is currently changing to a model focusing on student-centered learning, such as problem-based or project-based learning (PBL).Typically, thermodynamics courses are taught by lecture-oriented methodology, and the course introduces many new concepts, laws, definitions, and variables.Unlike concepts in other engineering courses, these concepts are not easy to visualize, tangible, or tactile senses in daily life.Therefore, many students struggled to understand the concept, or even though they understood the definitions, they had difficulties applying these concepts to the actual engineering problems.The authors developed the EML-based project to help students apply their knowledge to engineering problems.The project contains one extra class experiment, including measurement, discussion, and report delivery.To measure the improvements in students' understanding and confidence in thermodynamics concepts, we conducted a pre-and after-survey.After the project activity, a majority of the student answered they gained the confidence to solve the thermodynamics engineering problems in different aspects.