Interfaculty project PRIMECH aims at innovating first year Mechanics courses
In our technology driven world, new and more pressing societal challenges demand for more and more engineering graduates. Also in TU Delft, the number of first year students is increasing and will increase every year. This calls for change and innovation in the way we provide Bachelor Education.
PRIMECH stands for PRogramme of Innovation in MECHanics education. It is an interfaculty project started at TU Delft on 1 October 2021. It has been initiated by the Student Council and supported by Education & Student Affairs. PRIMECH aims at innovating first year Mechanics courses, and the first focus is on Statics.
PRIMECH is inspired by PRIME (which focuses on Math education instead). However, the project team realised very soon that PRIME started from a different context than PRIMECH. Therefore, they took the chance to take a step back and better understand the current situation of Mechanics Education in TU Delft.
Hence, they have dived into an exploration phase, interviewing lecturers, students and support staff while trying to picture the current habitat of Mechanics education, especially in the first year Bachelor of 3ME, AE and CEG faculties. They have been focusing on pain points and opportunities for improvement, but also on opportunities for interfaculty collaboration. So far, they have uncovered three recurrent themes:
- Helping more first year students adopting a ‘deep approach’ to learning core engineering subjects. For example learning how to learn, becoming a university student, seeking for conceptual understanding, improving retention and transfer of Mechanics knowledge.
- Facilitating the alignment between Mechanics courses within a curriculum, helping students seeing how the different courses fit together and form a path to become an engineer.
- Promoting the interfaculty exchange of material, good practices and peer-to-peer support between teachers. No need to reinvent the wheel every time, also because we have already pretty good wheels in TU Delft.
They also decided on a general approach they would like to follow for this project, which comprises of six phases:
- Exploration
- Collaborative design (with teachers, students, ...)
- Development
- Implementation
- Evaluation
- Refinement and extension
They are now at the start of phase 2: collaborative design. The project team truly believes that a 'PRIMECH solution', one that can do real work in practice and can be sustained over time, can be found and developed only through a creative collaboration between all the parties involved. Therefore, next steps in the PRIMECH project entail multiple workshops. The first will be on the Statics courses. The team is really looking forward to the discussion with the teachers, hearing their views on education in general and on Statics in particular. If you would like to contribute to the discussion and stay up-to-date with the PRIMECH progress, please enrol to the monthly newsletter.
PRIMECH Team:
Project leader: M.Gavioli
System architect: A. Kastelijn
Project referee: Prof.dr.ir. J. Hellendoorn
Student Council referee: J. van Dijk
