An Effective Teaching Method for Problem Solving in Engineering

This paper presents a tandem method for teaching procedural problem solving concepts to students.This method improves the quality of students' learning by allowing instructors to apply and relate course concepts to solving problems.An example of a procedural approach in problem solving is the design of sequential circuits in the Digital Systems course taught to engineering students where a procedural algorithm consisting of many steps is introduced.Typically the teaching process includes solving a numerical example.Traditionally, the example is taught after the procedural algorithm is described.By this time, students have already become distant from the steps explained for the procedure and their rational.Thus, it is difficult to show the importance of each step in the procedure while describing it.It is also hard to relate the example to the procedure when the example is being solved.As a result, students become bored and inattentive during the lecture and cannot follow the relation between the procedure and the example.An alternative is to introduce the example side by side, in tandem, with the procedure.Along with the start of the procedure, an example is also introduced.Then, as each step of the procedure is being discussed, the corresponding step is applied to the example.The tandem method is more effective since it facilitates (a) the explanation of the procedure and (b) the students' realization of the conceptual topics and therefore saves time.Two procedural algorithms are considered.The first one is from a Linear Algebra course explaining a procedure for solving first order differential equations and the second is from a Digital Systems course that provides steps in designing Sequential circuits.