Adoption of Cacpla Pedagogy Collaborate Approach to Improve Peer-Facilitated Tutorials in Material Science

Group project forms an integral part of engineering education because creating connections between the course modules and its applications can be a difficult task. Therefore, team dynamics/cooperative learning can play a major role in determining the success rate of learners, with new pedagogies and think-pair-share sessions in the forefront of achieving this. For example, the jigsaw approach in the context of engineering education creates expert teams from a group of students by bringing together sub-sets of a group, with each team saddled with the responsibility of studying a specific module and discussing the outcomes with peers. In this study, the jigsaw method is abstracted from the collaborate section of the new pedagogy- CACPLA (Communicate, Active, Collaborate, Problem-based Solving, Learning and Assessment), and assisted with tutorials and peer facilitated studies on elasticity of materials. The broad subject was subdivided into subsections such as: stress and strain in engineering materials, elasticity hysteresis, Hooke's law, stress tensors, bulk modulus, modulus of elasticity, and young modulus. Based on these subtopics, each of the 7 sub-groups were entrusted with creating scenarios for solving actual problems and these groups were further streamlined to form a core group for the study. We present case-studies on how the collated jigsaw pieces were useful to support the students and create in-depth knowledge on the subject matter.