Fit for science a course for teaching to organize, perform and present scientific work in engineering with mobile devices

In German higher engineering education the meaningful use of mobile devices is still underrepresented and seldom goes beyond simple technology provision. This is the case although the use of mobile devices offers completely new opportunities for teaching and learning contexts. The course “Fit for Science” wants to change this. Hence, it is developed to give the students the opportunity to use tablet PCs in context of their studies and simultaneously to improve their abilities in the field of scientific working processes. Therefore this course concept heavily relies on the use of Evernote, which is an online tool for developing shared notebooks and with this documenting and organizing the working process. In addition to that Evernote perfectly works as an application on mobile devices, too. The course itself is divided in four present meetings and three working phases in which students apply in teams the learned methods on an own research project. During the working phases students create presentations, a poster, and a scientific report. Based on the internal course evaluation and the students´ feedback we found that the combination of tablet PCs with the Evernote software is a good opportunity to show how mobile devices can meaningfully be integrated into higher engineering education.