TITLE:
Physical Concepts about Telecommunications Theory Focusing on Knowledge Application
AUTHORS:
Oscar H. Salinas, Angel Estrada Arteaga, Martha E. Luna Ortíz, Marco A. Amado González
KEYWORDS:
Physics; Telecommunications; Electromagnetic Theory; Pedagogical; Software; Learning Styles
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.5 No.1,
January
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: Teaching telecommunications theory for Engineering Technologies
Information students can be viewed as an interesting challenge. This is mainly due to Telecommunications
theory which integrates
knowledge about two basic sciences: physics and mathematics. The proposal
explained in this paper focused on obtaining and deeply understanding the physical concepts related to the theory
of telecommunications, rather than memorizing equations, which most of the time would not make sense for
students. Engineering students’ work focusing on learning the
physical and mathematical concepts, was able to design and develop academic
tools with two important characteristics for Universities with low budget: easy
to use and inexpensive. Therefore, the teaching-learning process is more efficient being adjusted to their endemic
circumstances about understanding, knowledge application and few economic
resources. Moreover those students were facing less problems understanding and
handling the mathematical equations related to the telecommunications theory.
Following the proposed procedure, students have designed and built academic
tools, such as videos, crosswords, C#
applications, graphing on worksheets, and so on. To monitor progress weekly, evaluation was conducted using
questionnaires without equations, which were evaluated by the students
themselves. Electronic and pedagogical tools were combined to design specific
audiovisual aids to facilitate and assure that students were obtaining and
retaining those physical and mathematical concepts before starting the
equations handling. A comparison was done about groups working under two
scenarios: the one described above and the other called in this
report “traditional”. A drastic difference about student’s grades between two
groups was observed.