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Elasticity and Strength of Materials is an elementary discipline across many engineering degrees. Students perceive it as very difficult and abstract and students' active participation in the learning process is needed, due to its complexity and importance during the whole degree years. Hence, the main difficulty in teaching them is maintaining students' motivation and keeping their participation in the learning process. This is the reason to use new tools, such as problem-based learning (PBL) and flipped classroom, to help students understand and study the subject. In this work, we present the application of a problem-based learning to the lab in the Mechanical engineering degree, in of one the most time-consuming and difficult subjects of its program. Moreover, to enhance students' enthusiasm and motivation, these sessions included an innovative manufacturing technology, 3D printing, and digital image correlation (DIC). Before each practical session, the students are encouraged to watch an online video with the fundamental aspects. In order to assess the success of this laboratory course, after finishing the lab sessions, the students answered a non-formal quantitative survey. The results showed that the proposed project-based learning had the ability to help integrating the knowledge and improve the skills included in the main competences. Although these results are encouraging, there are still parts of the lab activity that should be improve in order to make the activity less time consuming and the most difficult part being easier for the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a rationale and practical set of guidelines for enrichment clusters, a program that supports a different brand of learning from the deductive and prescriptive approach that dominates activities in so many of today's classrooms. Enrichment clusters are interest-based and student-centric, and provide a space for inductive, investigative high-end learning that can fit into any school program. This article describes the learning theories and goals that guided the development of enrichment clusters and describes in detail the meaning of high-end learning and real problems. Also discussed are results from studies of Enrichment Cluster implementations regarding the specific learning outcomes that students demonstrated and teachers observed, which include: problem finding and focusing, determining the relevance and bias of found information, planning and sequencing, metacognition, argumentation, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and evaluating data for patterns and discrepancies. This approach has been adopted in thousands of schools around the world and it seeks to develop gifted behaviours in larger numbers of students than most programs that focus only on high IQ students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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