enginy@eps: Motivating the Engineering Courses Social Valuation as a Motivating Factor B. Alorda, J. Verd Physics Department Universitat Illes Balears Palma de Mallorca, Spain tomeu.alorda@uib.es A. Burguera, J. Guerrero, M. Payeras, J. Ramis, G. Rodríguez-Navas Mathematics and Informatics Department Universitat Illes Balears Palma de Mallorca, Spain Abstract—This paper presents an academic initiative to increase the motivation of students for engineering topics, and discusses the results obtained. The initiative is a journal where students may publish, both in paper and in electronic format, the final reports of their laboratory works or research activities. The name of the journal is enginy@eps. The existence of this journal becomes an external element for motivating the students, since their documents are going to be reviewed by an editorial staff and are going to be published out of the classroom. The collected data shows that social recognition is still a useful element to motivate the students in technical courses. Keywords- student motivation; educational innovation; formal writing profile INTRODUCTION In the last subjects of engineer courses, students participate in autonomous works, research activities and laboratory sessions where it is necessary to go further than just to apply previously learned concepts. This kind of activities requires a lot of time and hard work not only from the students but, also from the teacher. Finally, once the work is evaluated for the course, it is usually forgotten and often the work conclusions are not used anymore. So, it seems contrary to the student’s and to the teacher’s motivation to foresee that their efforts will not be useful to anyone else, and that their work will be forgotten when the course ends. That situation is not a good motivating factor for the student and, of course, for the teacher. The student motivation is a complex topic, and it is difficult to quantify [1]. In some cases, the same thing does not motivate all students at the same time. Two factors that impact on student motivation are: the social valuation and the perception of the expectation of success [1]. It is important to note that both factors are part of a multiplication equation, so if anyone of these factors is zero, the result is zero too. This means that, the student must find some positive attraction toward the educational activity, but in addition, it is necessary a positive perception regarding the accomplishment of the learning activity. There are a lot of learning environments proposed to increase the students’ motivation, as an example in [2] and [5-6] a game based learning environment is used to increase the motivation of students in different courses. Furthermore, the students in first courses, in general, have initiated the Engineering careers without a clear idea about the topics and issues related with those courses. They may have no idea about the concepts and methodologies involved in their engineer courses. And they have difficulties to explain the reasons why they have selected these particular courses instead of some others. This initial confuse situation may be a disinclining factor; and it is difficult to know how many students leave the recently initiated studies by that reason. In [7] the authors propose to design initial courses with extensive active learning components in cooperative students teams as an effort to retain those confused students. The same situation may be identified when pre-university students have to select their university studies. Some different solutions have been proposed in our University to help students to solve this confuse situation as soon as possible: pre-university labs, adaptation courses, classrooms open door day, or talks about the features of different courses. All these solutions have a point in common: the university presents the information about their courses mainly from an institutional point of view. These solutions fail to provide more information about the real activities developed in the classrooms or information directly obtained from others students. From another point of view, but related to the proposed work, it is necessary to take into account that, all engineering activities and results have to be explained and summarized in any technical document. So, it is not only necessary to learn good competences in technical engineering topics, but it is also necessary to acquire good technical writing skills. Cockrum et al. in [3], propose some ideas of how to design writing courses, to help students to acquire those necessary generic competences. In this study, we propose to learn writing competences not in a separate subject, but in several subjects at the same time and in combination with each specific subject contents. Laboratory and autonomous works typically finish with the presentation of a document, which is, in fact, a technical document. In that case, the student, with some minimum requirements proposed by the teacher, writes the document using a free format. The second goal of this work is the coordination of several subjects to propose the same template format for all kind of educational activities. So, not additional documentation must be elaborated by students, it is only necessary to adopt a common document template and some 653 978-1-4244-6571-2/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education April 14-16, 2010, Madrid, SPAIN