A COMPETITIVE-GAME PROJECT-BASED LEARNING SCHEME
FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS SUBJECTS
A. Portilla-Figueras, S. Jim´enez-Fern´andez and S. Salcedo-Sanz
Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Universidad de Alcal´a, Spain
Keywords:
Project-based learning, Mobile communications, Competitive games.
Abstract:
This paper presents a project-based learning experience to teach mobile communications subjects, carried out
at Universidad de Alcal´a, Madrid, Spain. The experience consists of a competition among teams formed by
students, who act as consultant companies working for imaginary operators. The objective of the teams is
to obtain the best network design and economical budget for the imaginary operator in the city of Alcal de
Henares. The proposed learning scheme uses existing concepts of different fields, such as the project-based
or the competitive games methodologies, and applies them in the teaching of telecommunications subjects.
Details on the practical application of the methodology and the results obtained in Universidad de Alcal´a are
discussed in the paper.
1 INTRODUCTION
Mobile telecommunications have become a relevant
issue in our society. From the social point of view,
the mobile is the easiest way to access to the com-
munications technology. From the global economics
point of view, the mobile telecommunication market
is becoming of higher relevance in the global econ-
omy of the nations. As an example the contribution
of the mobile market to the UK economy the 2.2% in
2003, more than three times the average, and the fore-
cast is that it will increase up to 7.5% in 2013 (JCL
report, 2004).
Following this trend, almost all technical schools
and universities in the world offer courses about mo-
bile telecommunications (Cassara, 2006). Specifi-
cally, the majority of universities where electrical en-
gineering is taught, offerbasic courses about theGSM
system, that is also known as 2nd Generation Mobile,
previously to other courses about the 3rd generation
mobile communications. The teaching of the GSM
system in technical schools is usually done in two
steps: First, the students receive theoretical classes
about how the system works, with details of all its
components. In a second step, the students must have
the possibility of taking some laboratory work about
the GSM system.
In this paper we describe an experience carried out
in Universidad de Alcal´a, Madrid, Spain, in which a
project-based learning scheme (Shankar et al. 2000)
was used to teach part of a mobile communications
graduate subject. After a first stage in which the basic
theoretical notions of the GSM architecture are ex-
plained, we organized the project-based learning by
dividing the students of the subject in groups of 3 to
6 people. Each group represents a Consulting firm,
with the corresponding team leader. The work con-
sists of performing a full technical and economical
study in a specific city for a virtual operator, with
its specific economic and technical features. This
work is planned as realistic as possible, and then it
is like a competition between all teams in such a way
that the best project will obtain the best qualification.
The evaluation is done considering the technical qual-
ity of the solution, the presentation (how the team
is able to show the goodness of its study) and the
efficiency, in terms of network investment and con-
sulting budgets. In this paper we give details of this
project-based learning implementation, as well as the
results obtained after its application in a subject of the
Telecommunications Engineering degree at Universi-
dad de Alcal´a (UAH), Spain.
2 DESCRIPTION OF THE
PROJECT-BASED
METHODOLOGY PROPOSED
In the real world, the most part of network deploy-
ments are done in GSM and UMTS systems, so a
75
Portilla-Figueras A., Jiménez-Fernández S. and Salcedo-Sanz S. (2010).
A COMPETITIVE-GAME PROJECT-BASED LEARNING SCHEME FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS SUBJECTS.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 75-78
DOI: 10.5220/0002767800750078
Copyright
c
SciTePress
solid formation in these technologies is a must for
a telecommunications engineer. On the other hand,
our experience tells us that most telecommunication
engineers have jobs related with techno-economical
studies and/or consulting studies: the majority of en-
gineers work on project management and only a few
in low level technical issues. This fact made us to pre-
pare a different mobile communication course, with
a strong part of the course related to project manage-
ment. In order to propose such a course, the project-
based learning methodology has been considered. In
this section we give the basic details of this project-
based learning scheme for a mobile communication
subject.
The complete course is based into three interre-
lated blocks.
A set of theoretical lectures, where the concepts
and working of mobile communications are ex-
plained.
A set of lab works where the work teams have to
develop some software tools oriented to the mo-
bile network planning.
The Work Project, that is designed as a real con-
sultancy work.
The qualification of the course is divided into a
maximum of 5 points in a theoretical examination and
a maximum of 5 points for a consulting project. The
main objectives of the project are the following:
Learning how to work in a real case inside a work
team.
Learning how to assume a specific role and re-
sponsibilities in the work team.
Learning how to manage efficiently scarce re-
sources, specifically time and human effort.
Learning how to apply the knowledge of the lec-
tures into a real case.
Learning how to survive into a harsh competitive
environment.
Learning how to present the results of the work
(how to sell them to the client).
The project has been structured as follows: the
students are divided in several groups with 3 to 6
students. Each group will be treated as a consulting
company that will work for an imaginary operator.
The task of each group will be to perform the com-
plete mobile network deployment in a specific city of
Spain, with the corresponding real equipments and to
calculate the values of the cost per minute of the dif-
ferent services offered by the operator. In the course
2007/2008, the first year of application of the PBL,
the city selected was logically Alcal´a the Henares
where the University of Alcal´a is located. In the next
subsections we detail the complete methodology used
to supervise the projects.
2.1 Teams Composition
As has been mentioned before, each group is com-
posed of 3 to 6 students. The selection of the members
of the group is done by the students themselves. The
students are previously told that smaller groups will
haveless complicated projects than bigger groups, be-
cause in bigger groups can use economies of scale to
leverage the work of the project.
Each group has to select the name of the consult-
ing firm and the corresponding corporative logo. Fur-
thermore they have to establish a template for all the
reports they have to produce, in order to give a pro-
fessional image.
A relevant issue at this point is the figure of the
team leader. In the real world the team leader in a con-
sulting project is a senior consultant that obviously
has more responsibility than the rest of the project
members, but on the other hand, he/she earns more
money. In our case, the team leader has the responsi-
bility of the success of the project. If the project ends
correctly, the qualification of the team leader will be
higher than the rest of team members. Opposite, if
the project fails, the team leader will be consequently
penalized. We encourage the students with more ini-
tiative to be the teams leaders.
2.2 Work Definition
As it is outlined above, each team is commissioned
with the mobile network deployment of a virtual op-
erator. The input data given to the team is described
below.
The technologies adopted by the operator, GSM
or GSM / UMTS.
The market share of the operator.
The bandwidth acquired by the operator in each
frequency band, GSM 900 MHz, GSM 1800
MHz, UMTS 2000 MHz.
The total annual minutes billed by the operator.
The service briefcase for each technology.
The difficulty level of the work depends on the
number of members in each team. We have divided
into three categories.
Small operator. Using only GSM technology with
low market power, about 15-20% and with fre-
quency bands not very favorable and limited ser-
vice briefcase. The network design is simple, but
CSEDU 2010 - 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education
76
the profitability is low. Therefore in the conclu-
sions of the report they have to make lot of alle-
gations to the regulatory authorities. This kind of
operator will be for small teams with 3 members.
Medium operator. GSM and UMTS technology
with market power about 30% and reasonable fre-
quency bands and service briefcase. It is a com-
fortable position for the network design but the
level of exigency in the profitability results will
be very high. For teams with 4 members.
Large operator. This will be the case of the dom-
inant operator with a very high market power,
more than 40%, with a large briefcase and large
spectrum due to its economic power. The network
design is more difficult but the profitability is en-
sured due to economy of scale. However in the
report they have to defend against possible regu-
latory intrusions to favor the small operators. For
teams with 5 or 6 members.
The results of the project is a final report where
the following points must be described:
A executive summary describing the network de-
sign.
Firm, model, price and description of the commer-
cial equipments used for each network element.
Location in UTM coordinates of each BTS, BSC
and radio ling used in the network design, and
graphical representation of the results, in form of
the corresponding maps.
Consultant and network design economic reports.
Profitability of the proposed solution.
Diagram with the effort in man/months.
Conclusions and allegations for the regulatory au-
thorities.
Apart from the final report each team will have
to perform a short presentation to the lecturers of the
subject and other colleagues, some of them coming
from mobile operators such as Vodafone group. The
objective of this presentation is to force the students
to defend their solution against a “semi-hostile audi-
ence”, which represents the client in the real world,
and that tries to find any possible error on the design.
2.3 Competition and Collaboration
between Teams
A classical problem that arises in these types of
project-learning schemes is the reasonable collabora-
tion between all teams, sharing information or split-
ting tasks. In order to manage this point, we have
established the following: If the work is done cor-
rectly, the team will obtain a minimum qualification
of 2.5 over 5. However, the best group will obtain 5
points the second best up to a maximum of 4.75 the
third up to 4.5 and so on. Therefore we organize the
projects as a competition between the different groups
in such a way that sharing work or information with
other groups could be good or bad depending on the
situation. Competition or contests have been reported
before as a good methodology in engineering educa-
tion (Gregson, 1999), (Johnson, 2006).
In addition to competition, we also promote col-
laboration between teams, but in an organized form:
In the real world, consultant companies and operators
may work together. There are typical network deploy-
ments strategies carried out by mobile network oper-
ators in order to optimize their investments. For ex-
ample, site and infrastructure sharing where two op-
erators use the same constructions or masts, and part
of the network and the individual investment is hence
reduced. This kind of strategies are allowed in our
projects, in such a way that two teams can firm agree-
ments, supervised by the lecturer, to share sites, net-
work or only information. In some cases, a team may
ask another about information, and hence pay for it.
This payment is regulatedby the lecturer and a kind of
internal contract is sign between teams with the cor-
responding supervision. All these agreements have to
be reflected in the final report.
The final presentations are also a part of the
qualification. The teams representing operators with
higher market power start first. Therefore the teams
with minor market power may study the strategy of
the presentations of other teams and make corrections
and innovations on their own presentation. This en-
courages the imagination and improvisation capacity
of the teams’ members.
3 PRACTICAL APPLICATION:
EVALUATION OF AN
EXPERIENCE IN
UNIVERSIDAD DE ALCAL
´
A
The course Mobile Communications at Universidad
de Alcal´a, had 35 students in 2007/2008 academic
year. 29 students participated in the project-based
learning experience (2 students could not participate
due to medical reasons, and other 4 decided to attend
September exams to pass the course
1
.
1
In the Spanish University there are two chances to pass
each course: the first one in February or June exams (de-
pending on the course semester) and then a second one in
A COMPETITIVE-GAME PROJECT-BASED LEARNING SCHEME FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS SUBJECTS
77
These 29 students were grouped into seven teams
in the following way:
1. Group 1. Name: Deivcom, 6 members.
2. Group 2. Name: 2VZ, 5 members.
3. Group 3. Name: Efigenia, 5 members.
4. Group 4. Name: Aldama, 4 members.
5. Group 5. Name, Konektos, 5 members.
6. Group 6. Name, MCommunications, 4 members
7. Group 7. Name, CHT, 3 members.
The ranking of the competition was: 1.- Efige-
nia, 2.- Deivcom, 3.- Aldama 4.- Konektos, 5.- CHT,
6.- 2VZ and 7.- MCommunications. All teams per-
formed the work satisfactorily and therefore the team
leaders obtained the corresponding slight increment
in his/her qualification.
Several points can be used to measure the perfor-
mance of our experience. The first one is the percent-
age of students that did not attend to the February ex-
aminations. Figure 1 shows that in the academic year
2006/2007 this figure was near 30%, however in this
year it was less than 10%. This indicates that the stu-
dents perceive that the course is more interesting with
this kind of methodology, so the students work more
hours in the subject.
Figure 1: Comparison of marks’ histogram for academic
years 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 (a value 0 means that the
student did not attend to the February exam).
The second indicator is the number of students
that did not pass the course (final mark below 5 points
out of 10). With the traditional methodology applied
in 2006/2007 this percentage were 10.8%, but in this
year we have reduced the percentage of students who
fail the exam to 5.8%.
The third indicator is the average qualification that
has increased from 6.92 to 7.48 (see Table 1). Finally
the statistical mode was 9 in year 2007/2008 whereas
in the previous year was 7.
September exams.
Table 1: Detailed comparison of marks for academic year
2006/2007 and 2007/2008. DNA stands for the percentage
of students who did not attend to the February exam.
Parameter 2006/07 2007/08
DNA (%) 29.7 8.6
Fail(%) 10.8 5.8
Average mark 6.82 7.48
Statistical mode of marks 7 9
4 CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents the application of a project-based
learning scheme (PBL) to a course about mobile com-
munications in the 5th year of the Telecommunication
Engineering studies at Universidad de Alcal´a. The
students impression about the methodology is that,
in the last years of their degree this kind of projects
prepare them better to their professional life, because
the type of activities done in the proposed project are
closer to the ones done in their future jobs.
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P. H. Gregson and T. A. Little (1999). Using contests to
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M. C. Johnson and Y. H. Lu (2006). Teaching software en-
gineering through competition and collaboration. In
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P. M. Shankar and B. A. Eisenstein (2000). Project-Based
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