An interactive teaching approach based on student-teams

This paper discusses the advantageous instructional experience of adding the ldquostudent-teamrdquo feature to the ldquoclassicalrdquo interactive teaching approach. The classical approach consists of three phases: 1) Presentation of an interesting engineering problem by the instructor, 2) Solution of the problem by students, resulting in the generation of a ldquotheoretical expectationrdquo usually represented graphically in the form of a sketch, and 3) Computer simulation of the problem with the aim of verifying the theoretical expectation. The approach presents a potential problem: students with less power of abstraction often get frustrated when they cannot generate a theoretical expectation, so they tend to skip phase 2), in an attempt to use computer simulation as a substitute for thinking. If the instructor allows this to happen, interactive teaching fails. To solve the above problem, I incorporated student-teams into the interactive learning process. In each team, a student with strong power of abstraction operates as the leader. She or he leads the discussion to generate a theoretical expectation. The paper presents useful implementation details of this new instructional experience, as well as a measurement of the resulting learning improvement.