The Colos Project Applications in the Domain of Electrical Engineering

1. Abstract In this paper we present the COLOS project which consists in teams of 10 european universities with a common approach of teaching in technical and scientiic elds. We show how this approach can be applied and result in highly interactive computer aided teaching modules. We show examples of such applications in the domain of electrical engineering, which are eeectively used by students at Ecole Centrale de Lyon, and we conclude about how to evaluate such pieces of software. 2. Introduction COLOS (COnceptual Learning Of Science) is a european consortium composed of research teams part of ten universities of seven diierent countries 1], sponsored at the european level by the Hewlett-Packard company. COLOS has been initially impulsed in 1988 by Zvonko Fazarinc, a teacher at Stan-ford University (CA). The major goal of this consortium is to encourage the development of teaching methods so as to improve the knowledge and understanding of fundamental concepts with a special focus on intuitive and qualitative approaches, more particulary in the scientiic and technical elds. 3. The COLOS philosophy The COLOS members are led by a general philosophy of teaching sciences, the main idea being to promote the learning of basic concepts, to enable the learner gaining a deeper understanding of fundamental phenomena in scientiic and technical domains 2]. In the all-day life we can observe and directly interact with our environment, which enables and facilitates a rapid and intuitive comprehension of the involved phenomena. We believe that the main reason why most students, even if able to solve standard problems, do not have { or seldom acquire { a really deep understanding of the basic principles is that the traditional teaching of sciences does generally not try to base the understanding on experiences of direct interaction with the studied phenomena. The fantastic power of today's workstations and of their software environments now allow the mimicking of nature on the fundamental principles, ooering the students easy-to-use, highly interactive computer aided learning software packages which we believe have the potential of helping them gain a deeper understanding of complex