Development of a new educational package based on e-learning to study engineering thermodynamics process: combustion, energy and entropy analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a new educational package based on e-learning called TermolabUA integrated by three programs, which are VOLCONTROL focused on the analysis of steady-state flow devices, CarnotCycle aimed to analyze reversible and irreversible processes, and CombustionUA to study combustion processes. The educational package was designed for both, to promote significant learning on some thermodynamic topics in undergraduate students, and to help the student to reach the cognitive competencies of interpreting, arguing and proposing, and interacting with the different graphical user interfaces to solve relevant cases studies. Also, the teaching-learning activity helps them to understand the influence of a specific variable on the energy and entropy behavior of the selected systems, which is traditionally studied manually in a classroom. The results of the t-Student tests showed that the average grades obtained by the students in the problems using the software were higher than the average grade without using the software. The estimate for the average grade difference was 0.56 with a P-value ¼ 3.31E- 13 for Problem 1 and 0.631 with a P-value ¼ 3.31E-13 for Problem 2 in the Workshop- VOLCONTROL. Similar results were obtained for the problems reported in the CarnotCycle and CombustionUA Workshop with an estimate for average grade differences and P-values lower than 0.79 and 0.05, respectively. It means that the new software package significantly improved the learning skills of the students.