Maria de Fátima Chouzal

U.Jr. — Mentoring in action: Junior University at U.Porto

Universidade Júnior provides 11 to 17 years old secondary school pupils with the opportunity to get in touch with university life by offering an action packed variety of learning experiences during 5 weeks in July and September. This very busy and varied offer requires careful preparation which involves mentoring activities that are developed at two levels: between faculty and the junior tutors and between these and the young pupils. They are scrutinized in this paper.

Visualizing understanding with concept maps

Engineering education is facing a changing world in which how one thinks is becoming more important than what one thinks; that is, our course content is important but constantly changing and we need to help students learn how to think about that content. One instructional strategy that shows promise is the use of concept mapping, a learning activity that requires students to explain their understanding of important ideas and the relationships among those ideas. This paper describes a pilot project to integrate concept mapping into a Mechanical Engineering Course and the preliminary results of that project.

Let's work with AR in DC circuits

Electricity fundamentals, as is the case of direct current or DC circuits, are still a problem among secondary school and even freshman university students. On the other hand youngsters are proficient users of emergent technology items. Having these features in mind the work presents different augmented reality approaches to DC circuits in order to contribute to attenuate these difficulties and to evaluate the potential of that technology in this area.

Virtual instrumentation for a new health care device

Nowadays, the assessment of body composition by estimating the percentage of body fat has a great impact in many fields such as nutrition, health, sports, chronic diseases and others. The main purpose for this work is to demonstrate the development of a Virtual Instrument that permits more effective assessment of body fat, automatic data processing, recording results and storage in a database, with high potential to conduct new studies.