Collaborative Learning Sessions in Engineering Education

This article demonstrates the implementation of a 3-hour teaching session on optical biosensors through the employment of a social constructivist approach. Informed by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, constructivist strategies, and project-based learning, the learning session was divided into pre-course work and live classroom exercises. While the pre-course work included fundamental spectroscopy concepts taught through videos, the classroom exercises involved the discussion of key concepts and an online simulator-based exercise for experiential and project-based learning. The final segment involved small-group discussions on medical applications of spectroscopy, encouraging peer feedback in the learning session. This approach aims to shift from traditional con-tent-heavy teaching to a more interactive, collaborative, and technologically integrated educational model.