Civil Engineering Master hands-on challenge to motivate first-year students : CIVIL’in 2017-2018

The CIVIL'in program started in the academic year of 2015-2016 with the goal of integrate and monitoring the new first-year students on the Master of Civil Engineering (MIEC) study cycle of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) [1]. The monitoring is conducted by tutorial during the first year, being assigned to the new student a single tutor that is a student attending advanced years. The tutor support is monitored by a MIEC teacher, which will assess the difficulties, give some advices to the issues raised by the tutor and observe the student's progress. This program aims a better integration of MIEC new students at FEUP allowing the tutors to develop relationship, socialization and team spirit that will be relevant to the acquisition of personal soft skills that are important for its future integration in job environments. In the academic year of 2017-2018, after some experience in the CIVIL'in Program by promoting different activities like the “best Civil Engineering photo”, the “best Civil Engineering Department video”, it comes the idea of presenting an hand-on challenge where students can learn in a friendly environment with young and older students and teachers of the different areas of Civil Engineering. The challenge, developed and monitored by CIVIL'in teachers, was considered an interesting activity. Students could understand construction processes by building a wall and they could analyze the qualitative thermal and acoustic behavior of the built wall by comparing experimental results from different built walls. This was also an opportunity of visiting Civil Engineer laboratories, using the equipment and anticipating some concepts, which first-year students will explore and learn later in the study cycle. The walls, built with mortar and plastic bottles, glass bottles or cans, presented some interesting results that fascinated the students.