An experience in cooperative learning developing a real aerospacial project

摘要

A lot of training time is devoted to help teachers arrange appropriate interactions between students and materials, and to how teachers should interact with students. However, how students should interact with each other is relatively ignored. It is a good idea that students learn within a supportive community in order to feel safe enough to take risks. Cooperative Learning (CL) is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, composed by students with different skills, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject [1]. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping his or her teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. In this paper an experience in CL with a group of students with different skills and ages developing the harness subsystem of the first lunar spacecraft built and operated by students across European Space Agency (ESA) Member States and ESA Cooperating States is described.