High order experimental skills’ gap identification – the need to reshape electronics teaching Carlos Felgueiras, André Fidalgo, Clara Viegas, Gustavo Alves School of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto ISEP/IPP, Porto, Portugal {mcf,anf,mcm,cga}@isep.ipp.pt Clovis Petry Federal Institute of Santa Catarina Santa Catarina, Brazil petry@ifsc.edu.br Abstract— Each knowledge area has its own evolutionary way, splitting in new knowledge areas, or simply abandoning some subjects to make room for new ones. As a result we can perceive the tendency for a given subject being treated differently, according to the course where it is taught. Thus, teaching electronics is different in an Electronics Course than in an Electric Power Systems Course. In the first this subject assumes some deepness while in the second it is, at best, only superficially presented. This strategy presents some advantages for the student, like cost and time requirements, and mainly the ability to move quickly into the labor market. Nevertheless we can identify some crucial drawbacks in this approach, mainly the very weak skill level attained in some crucial subjects, usually in the boundary between established knowledge areas. So, instead of getting solid skills about crucial electric and electronic components, students are often presented with simpler interface models, i.e. electronic "black boxes". Later on, when faced with a specific type of problems, graduated student are hardly able to identify solutions, due to their inherent lack of interdisciplinary skills. This work presents some perceptions related with the lack of some electronic concepts in engineering students, necessary to understand the implications on the electric power grid resulting from the use of non-linear loads. A methodology to characterize this situation and alternatives to overcome it are also presented. Keywords— Electronic teaching, non-linear electric loads, electric energy quality, engineering education. I. INTRODUCTION Higher-level education is seen as an important factor in modern societies and as a key role for the future success. Nevertheless its importance, this objective assumes significant costs for every country since the number of persons who seek this level of education has risen tremendously in the last half century. This growth brought new challenges to the economy of each country, but also to teaching methodologies [1]. Traditional methods (centered on the teacher) were no longer as efficient when delivered for the masses [2]. This led to the diversification of teaching strategies and also to shifting the focus to students and then to teaching and learning methods [3,4]. The Bologna reform helped universities to re-organize and optimize education resources [5], which led to a trend of shortening their degrees and focusing them in a given knowledge area [6,7]. These "Bologna" degrees became very specific, with a high level of specialization but a narrower scope. This approach presents advantages and disadvantages, namely in the case of engineering education [8]. This strategy allows keeping the technological and education development processes close to each other [9], but on the other hand can bring the disadvantage of decreasing competences for dealing with multidisciplinary problems. The function of the engineering profession is to manipulate materials, energy and information [10]. Engineering education is a complex process that generally makes students evolve from a start state to an end state using a strategy. The starting and ending state usually consider students' initial skills/knowledge and the ones desired at the end of the degree. The strategy plans how those final skills will be achieved at the final state. This process must be dynamic as those three components are constantly changing. The start state is not static because students can present different skill/expertise resulting from their individual choices and also due to environmental issues that affect their lives (technology issues, for instance). Thus, classes can be strongly heterogeneous and, as so, challenging to the teacher. The end state is also continuously changing as a consequence of the technological evolution. Thus, strategy should accompany these changes in order not only to link the start and end states but also to take advantage of technological and pedagogical advances in teaching. Examples of these developments have been reported and discussed in large scale in literature over the past years [6,7,11,12]. In order to follow, understand and act in the actual world, Engineering Education must be a dynamic adaptive process. This mean that changes in the real world should be followed by changes in the educational process. Teaching processes use subjects as pieces of information to build knowledge. Experience shows that higher efficiency can be achieved when theoretical concepts are complemented by experimentation. This completion can be a demonstration for something learned or for verifying if some experiment meets the specification. Changes in the real world must be followed by changes in the end state and its related subjects. Therefore, according to its actual usage, subjects can gain or lose importance and so been adapted in Engineering Education [11,12]. As result we can see subjects getting importance at different levels inside the same department. Some subjects got so huge importance that moved out to form new departments.