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

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

 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

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

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

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

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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JCL Communications Ltd. (2004). The Changing Economic

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F. A. Cassara (2006). Wireless Communications Labora-

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P. H. Gregson and T. A. Little (1999). Using contests to

teach design to EE juniors. IEEE Trans. Educ., 42(3).

M. C. Johnson and Y. H. Lu (2006). Teaching software en-

gineering through competition and collaboration. In

Proc. of the Amer. Soc. for Eng. Educ, Annual Confer-

ence.

P. M. Shankar and B. A. Eisenstein (2000). Project-Based

Instruction in Wireless Communications at the Junior

Level. IEEE Trans. Educ., 43(3).

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