Undergraduate peer tutoring and research experience during the pandemic

Abstract:

Among the academic hurdles that university students face in a course of numerical methods and programming is the rapid acquisition of cognitive strategies necessary to understand and reproduce a programming language. At the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences, the course that develops these topics (for environmental engineers) is the IGA-Calculus course, aimed at students of the third semester, who have had no previous programming experience. In previous years, it was not possible to develop programming routines with Matlab, having to resort to Microsoft Excel. To successfully address the problem, a workshop (mainly aimed at future students of the IGA-Calculus class) was designed and taught, at no cost, during the summer break of 2020, in which participating students acquired basic programming tools using Matlab. Twenty-nine students from different semesters enrolled, five of them stood out and were invited to tutor de IGA-Calculus course. Furthermore, the tutor students are now involved in space physics research projects and recently were accepted to present their research at an international conference.

In this presentation, we will outline the structure of the workshop offered as well as the training that the tutors received for both the regular course and their participation on the research projects. We will draw from the literature on active learning, peer tutoring, and undergraduate research experience to evaluate our outcomes and suggest future implementations.