Building a new education environment

Abstract

The process of university teaching and learning nowadays is continually changing, strongly looking for some effective stable methods due to the current information age. Our proposal is mainly focused in transforming the traditional classroom into a workroom by reproducing inside, an industry-alike environment. Every educational activity in the workroom is developed following industry goals and policies, as consequence of having the making of a product as a final target. Thus, this workroom-based education is a complete development exercise, like we could find in a startup company. All this generates a new level of academic results and goals. We have implemented this method in a set of courses of our undergraduate Systems Engineering and graduate Computer Science programs at the Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela. Herein, we will use the experience in the workroom of the course “Introduction to Programming”.