Applying research methodology to undergraduate courses

Students at the School of Engineering of the University of Buenos Aires are requested, in their senior years from a six year program, to produce some research related activities and to write a thesis. Thesis works are regularly procrastinated because of reasons such as a highly unstructured (and thus unfamiliar) activity, lack of background on how to perform research, workplace pressure or lack of time. In addition, there is a social appreciation of research as a highly difficult task reserved only to Nobel Prize winners. Also research activities have been considered as being very different from the daily engineer´s work. In one of our courses, students get the big picture of concurrent programming fundamentals and its associated caveats and then, they must cover a more real world approach. We decided to guide them in some information collecting tasks, asking students to use some of the approaches in real world problems and comparing them by developing figures of merit. In the process we found ourselves developing in our students skills which seems to be more transferable than detail level programming skills and more in line with modern software industry requirement.