Plug and Play with a QoV Model

A Research Based Learning Approach

Carlos Vivas L´opez, Diana Hern´andez Alcantara, Juan Carlos Tud´on Mart´ınez

and Ruben Morales-Menendez

Tecnol´ogico de Monterrey, School of Engineering and Sciences,

Av. E. Garza Sada # 2501, 64.849 Monterrey NL, Mexico

Keywords:

Research Based Learning, Educational Technology, SemiActive Suspension Systems.

Abstract:

An application that allows and encourages the Research-Based Learning (RBL) was developed. This facilitates

students the interaction with a real prototype under the Plug & Play approach. Students with minimal knowl-

edge of hardware, low-level programming, signal processing or control design, intuitively could discover and

build your knowledge based on a generic guide. The system is based on instructional design for the student to:

establish a link between theory and practical solutions, internalize the knowledge, exploit critical thinking, and

high motivation by the intellectual challenge of solving a real problem. The experimental platform includes a

prototype scale (1:5) Quarter of Vehicle (QoV) model with an Electro-Rheological damper that represents a

vehicle semi-active suspension system. The QoV model is equipped with several sensors for measuring: the

positions on the motor base, the suspended mass and between the rim and the sprung mass, the acceleration

in the tire and the sprung mass, and the damper force of the system. An Human Machine Interface talks

with a DSpace data acquisition card that communicates with the sensors/actuators system and works directly

with Matlab/Simulink. Early results have been found more efﬁcient teaching-learning for several reasons:

(1) students concentrate efforts on the learning objective (minimum programming), (2) a real scale prototype

is available, (3) students can share their designs seamlessly and reuse software accelerating , and (5) high

motivation because the research and easy use of the system.

1 MOTIVATION

M´exico ended 2014 as the largest vehicle producer in

Latin America and 7

worldwide. Mexican automo-

tive industry saw its consolidation as one of the top

countries in vehicle production and export, as a result

of Nissan, Honda and Mazda’s new facilities opening

in central M´exico. During 2014 the automotiveindus-

try was close to 3.5 million produced vehicles; with-

out considering the launch Daimler/Nissan, together

with the foreseeable arrival of new investment from

the existing brands in M´exico, plus a couple of com-

panies reassuring its investment this year (Elie, 2013).

Mexico will be close to 5.0 million produced vehi-

cles in 2020. This will demand more successful pro-

fessionals in this ﬁeld. automotive industry. The dis-

tribution requirements in terms of total employment

are: (1) Manufacturing components: 52 %, (2) As-

sembly: 21 %, (3) Logistics and storage: 8 %, (4)

Administration: 8 %, (5) Design and development

product: 6 %, (6) Sales and Service customer: 3%

and (7) Industrial safety: 2 %. The employment in

the sector is concentrated in manufacturing and as-

sembly (73 %); but, the activity with greater value-

added is Design. The Mexican automobile sector has

the most modern and efﬁcient installed capacity for

vehicle production worldwide. Production capacity

is highly technical and very ﬂexible, which makes

it possible to manufacture several types of models.

Mexico must increase its focus on Design and Devel-

opment Product to enhance the value-added sector.

Higher education has a crucial role in this oppor-

tunity. Higher education seeks to develop graduates

with a wide range of intellectual and practical knowl-

edge and skills, such as critical and creative think-

ing, written and oral communication, quantitative lit-

eracy, information literacy, teamwork and problem

solving, civic knowledge and engagementlocal and

global, intercultural knowledge and competence, eth-

ical reasoning and action, and foundations and skills

for lifelong learning, (n.d., 2011). Tecnol

ogico de

Monterrey is working on these needs through different

initiatives in undergraduate programs such as Inter-

ship Program in Research and Innovation, (Galeano-

277

Vivas-López C., Hernández Alcantara D., Tudón Martínez J. and Morales-Menendez R..

Plug and Play with a QoV Model - A Research Based Learning Approach.

DOI: 10.5220/0005440202770284

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 277-284

ISBN: 978-989-758-107-6

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

S´anchez et al., 2011) (Galeano-S´anchez et al., 2012).

Students for the automotive sector with better cre-

dentials and skills using innovative teaching-learning

techniques such as Research Based Learning (RBL)

are been graduated every year.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2

brieﬂy reviews the RBL approach and how is going

to be exploited in this study case. Section 3 describes

the opportunities in the control system of semi-active

suspensions to justify the development of educational

technology. Section 4 presents some preliminary re-

sults. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.

2 RESEARCH BASED LEARNING

The term undergraduate research and its integration

into the curriculum grows out of US practice; in

particular through innovations pioneered at the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the

leadership of Margaret MacVicar, MITs Dean of Un-

dergraduate Education. In 1969, MIT started the Un-

dergraduate Research Opportunities Program. This

developed as a cross-institutional initiative that sup-

ported selected students to work on student initiated

and faculty-supported research projects.

The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergrad-

uates in the Research University called for ten key

changes in undergraduate education, four of which

demand to strengthen the undergraduateexperience of

research: (1) Make Research-Based Learning (RBL)

the standard, (2) Construct an Inquiry-Based Fresh-

man year, (3) Build on Research-Based Strategies to

characterize the whole of a research university educa-

tion, and (4) Culminate with a capstone experience.

After this report, all types of US institutions of higher

learning were transformed based on the principle that

research-based learning should inform all levels of

undergraduate education, (n.d., 1998).

At higher education level, you cannot be a good

teacher unless you are also a good researcher. The

quality which makes higher education higher and

quiet different from training is that it is grounded

in a deep understanding of the provisional nature of

knowledge, (Baldwin, 2005). Linking research and

teaching has several advantages in enhancing student

learning. Immersing students in the relevant disci-

plinary and research cultures and the process of do-

ing research and enquiry can be of wider beneﬁt. Re-

search strategies develop important skills. Addition-

ally, students who are actively involved in research

are more engaged.

(Healey and Jenkins, 2009) organized the ways of

engaging students in research in a two-axes map, Fig.

1. One axis classiﬁes the ways students may be en-

gaged in research according to the extent to which stu-

dents are treated primarily as the audience or as par-

ticipants, while the other axis classiﬁes the approach

as emphasising research content or research processes

and problems. All ways are valuable and interdepen-

dent. Effective programmes incorporate all these dif-

ferent modes.

Students are participants

Students frequently are an audience

Emphasis

on research

content

Emphasis

on research

processes

and problems

Research

Tutored

Research

based

Research

led

Research

oriented

Figure 1: The nature of undergraduate research. Research-

led: learning about current research in the discipline;

research-oriented: developing research skills and tech-

niques; research-based: undertaking research and inquiry;

and research-tutored: engaging in research discussions.

• Research-led: learning about current research in

the discipline. Students can be engaged through

lectures, academic staff-led seminars, laboratories

and course work.

• Research-oriented: developing research skills and

techniques. Course lectures, practical and labora-

tory classes and course work are common modes

of teaching in which research skills and tech-

niques are particularly developed.

• Research-based: undertaking research and in-

quiry. The most obvious way for students to en-

gage in research is to undertake research projects

(or capstone research) and inquiry projects, both

within the curriculum and outside it.

• Research-tutored: engaging in research discus-

sions. Engaging in discussion is a key way to de-

velop understanding.

In much of higher education programs relatively

too much teaching and learning is in the bottom half

of this model, and most students would beneﬁt from

spending more time in the top half. The way the four

approaches are interlinked together is important in the

design of effective courses.

3 EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

The primary functions of an automotive suspension

system are to (Gillespie, 1992): (1) isolate the chas-

sis motion from road irregularities, (2) keep the tire-

road contact with minimal load variations, and (3)

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278

resist roll of the chassis. They depend on the vehi-

cle vertical force that it must transmit from the tires

to the chassis. According to the capability to adjust

the damping force, the automobile suspensions can

be classiﬁed as: passive, active or semi-active. Pas-

sive suspensions are only able to dissipate the energy

and their damping characteristics are time invariant,

while active ones are able to store, dissipate and gen-

erate energy through a variable damping coefﬁcient

but they are very expensive to apply because require

an external power supply.

Semi-active control has recently been an area of

much interest because of its potential to provide sim-

ilar performances of active actuators; but, without a

signiﬁcant external power supply (Fijalkowski, 2011).

The semi-active suspensions consist on a spring and

damping component; its continuous variable damping

coefﬁcient adjusted by external control signals offers

much better performance .

There are 4 main technologies of semi-active

dampers: Electro-Hydraulic, Pneumatic Actuators,

Magneto-Rheological and Electro-Rheological (ER).

ER dampers are used in this application, they contain

a rheological ﬂuid, the semi-activeness is manipulated

by adjusting an electric ﬁeld.

Four topics will be considered with this edu-

cational technology: (1) Quarter of Vehicle (QoV)

model, (2) Damper modeling, (3) Control systems,

and (4) Data-based control algorithms.

QoV Model. The QoV model is the most basic

system to represent an automotive suspension, Fig.

2. Its use assumes an equivalent load distribution

among the four corners and a linear dependency with

respect to the translational and rotational chassis mo-

tions. The system considers a sprung mass (m

) and

an unsprung mass (m

). A spring with stiffness coef-

ﬁcient k

and a semi-active damper represent the sus-

pension between both masses. The semi-active damp-

ing force (F

) depends on a control input variable

and it is highly nonlinear with respect to the suspen-

sion motion. The stiffness coefﬁcient k

models the

wheel tire. The vertical position of the mass m

)

is deﬁned by z

), while z

corresponds to the un-

known road disturbance, Fig. 3.

Damper Modeling. To characterize all rhelogical

phenomena, an efﬁcient experimentation is needed.

Different experiments allow to explore the damping

force in the Force-Velocity characteristic map. Each

experiment consists on a displacement sequence that

analyzes the mechanical properties and an electric se-

quence that explores the transient response between

the magnetic ﬁeld and damping variation, (Lozoya-

Santos, 2013).

Control Systems. An extensive classiﬁcation of

Figure 2: Quarter of Vehicle (QoV) Model.

different control strategies for semi-active dampers

according to the type of manipulation (continuous or

on-off ), control goal (comfort, road holding or both),

type of control law to include the semi-activeness

(clipped, frequency adaptive, frequency switched,

measurement-based), type of control design (model-

based or free of model), etc. is presented in (Lozoya-

Santos, 2013).

The interest in semi-active suspensions derives

from the potential for improvements to vehicle ride

performance with no compromise in handling, with-

out considering its type of control design. It is nec-

essary to assume a balance in the controller design

goals.

Data-based Control Algorithms. Only measure-

ments and analytical estimations are used to monitor

the suspension behavior to adjust the damping force

according to the desired performances. The most rep-

resentative control approach for comfort is the Sky-

Hook (SH) controller, which has been successfully

applied on commercial vehicles. The principle of this

algorithm is to link the chassis to the sky by a vir-

tual damper and put a controlled damper among the

masses, in order to reduce the vertical oscillations of

the chassis.

Based on the acceleration measurement instead of

the velocity of the sprung mass, the named Acceler-

ation Driven Damper (ADD) control (Savaresi et al.,

2005) and its improvedversion have become new efﬁ-

cient comfort-oriented controllers. In the sense of re-

ducing the number of measurements that are used to

control the damping force, (Spelta et al., 2011) pro-

posed the Mix-1-stroke algorithm that shows similar

performance as the SH-ADD controller, but with only

one measurement.

In a dual way to the SH, the Ground-Hook (GH)

controller has been proposed to reduce the road hold-

ing by including a virtual damping between the wheel

and road and a controllable semi-active shock ab-

sorber. This is the most representativecontrol strategy

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279

Sprung mass

Unsprung

mass

Force sensor

(suspension)

Sprung mass

accelerometer

Deflection sensor

(suspension)

Position sensor

Sprung mass

Linear motor

Position sensor

Unsprung mass

accelerometer

Electro-Rheological damper

Figure 3: Quarter of Vehicle (QoV) Model.

fully oriented to road holding, (Valasek et al., 1997).

This ER shock absorber is adjusted using a manip-

ulation voltage between 0 and 5 kV. Below the wheel

lies an linear servomotor that mimics the desired road

proﬁle. The servomotor have a bandwidth of 0-20

Hz with a maximum velocity of 1.5 m/s. The mo-

tor has its own servo-driver and is operated from a

computer by sending the desired road proﬁle through

the Dspace

. This platform is equipped with a wide

variety of sensors as is shown in Fig. 3. A photo is

shown Fig. 4.

Figure 4: Experimental QoV Model, manufactured by

SOBEN

A Human Machine Interface (HMI) was devel-

oped to easily interact with the experimental QoV

model. This HMI is the fundamental platform for the

RBL proposal. Basically, this represents a Hardware-

in-the-Loop (HiL), that is used in the development and

test of complex real-time embedded systems, Fig. 5.

Figure 6 shows how a Dspace card talks with the

experimental platform and Matlab/Simulink on real

time. The HMI running on Matlab has conﬁgured a

general control system with different options for each

Figure 5: Human Machine Interface (HMI).

Figure 6: Communication system.

Control

Algorithm

Performance

goals

Zus

mus

...

Datales

Controller-1

Controller-2

Controller-n

Road-m

Road-1

Road-2

Figure 7: Plug and play system.

block/signal, Fig. 7. Based on this ﬂexibility, the HMI

allows:

• Design a control system as if you were drawing a

block diagram (Drag and Drop), Fig. 8.

• Reuse software such as: road proﬁle, control al-

gorithms, etc.

• Online plotting and registering.

• Online access to the Matlab and toolboxes plat-

form.

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Figure 8: Simulink interface. Conﬁgure a control system is

as easy as drawing it.

4 EARLY RESULTS

Early results could be discussed in 3 great points: (a)

HMI, (b) RBL and (c) Academic results

4.1 HMI

A Vehicle Dynamics course provides a fundamental

understanding of vehicle ride and handling behaviour

and links this understanding to the practical impli-

cations for chassis and suspension design. Mechan-

ical Engineering students have a low background in

control systems, instrumentation, low-level program-

ming, etc. The main goal of the HMI is to allow stu-

dents an easy and friendly operation of the experi-

mental QoV model. To design , implement and test

in a prototype vehicle (in minutes) is a great learn-

ing experience and motivation. This HMI opens a

number of opportunities in active learning, problem-

based learning and research-based learning , allowing

students so extremely easy to live a practical experi-

ence. Practice on a prototype has some disadvantages

as some dynamic phenomena can not be reproduced

accurately; however, also has important advantages

such as time efﬁciency and overall safety of experi-

mentation. Additionally, students will have a reposi-

tory of several elements to design (to draw) a control

system such as different proﬁle of the roads, type of

standard tests, data-based control algorithms, model-

based control algorithms, etc.

Students will be focus in the academic goals, with-

out consuming time on implementation details (it is

not the objective of this course). Eventually, students

will be able to design and contribute with new tool-

Figure 9: Vehicle Dynamics Repository: control algo-

rithms, road proﬁles, etc.

boxes to the Vehicle Dynamics repository with new

ideas and code.

4.2 RBL

The Vehicle Dynamics course was re-designed in

three teaching-learning activities: (1) Lectures, (2)

Experiments and (3) Reports, Fig. 10. The novel ac-

tivities to this course are Experiments and Reports.

Lectures were more conventional but focus in the Ex-

periments.

Three modes of inquiry were exploited in the Lec-

tures: structured providing a problem and an outline

for addressing it; guided providing questions to stim-

ulate inquiry, but students are self-directed as regards

exploring these questions; and open where students

formulate the questions themselves. Also during the

Lectures, special emphasizes was given to different

strategies for linking teaching and research, (Baldwin,

2005):

• Draw on Personal Research in Designing and

Teaching Courses. Own research was incorpo-

rated into the course to motivate students. Grad-

uate students participate and discuss their current

research results as a part of Automotive Consor-

cium Research Group.

• Place the Latest Research in the Field Within Its

Historical Context in Classroom Teaching. The

lastest damping theories and control algorithms

are included. The technological advances in the

automotive industry are discussed.

• Design Learning Activities Around Contemporary

Research Issues. Students were asked to explore

cutting-edge research problems, i.e. the tradeoff

of comfort and road-holding for semiactive sus-

pension systems (which is an open question).

• Teach Research Methods, Techniques and Skills

Explicitly Within Programs. ER damper modeling

demands both model equation and experimental

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281

data. Representative data comes from a special

Design of Experiments. Students must learn these

research methods.

• Build Small-scale Research Activities into Under-

graduate Assignments. This is the main applica-

tion of this proposal.

• Infuse Teaching with the Values of Researchers.

Through different activities the following values

of researchers are discussed: openness, scepti-

cism to received theories, honesty with oneself as

well as others, respect for evidence, respect to oth-

ers, tolerance of ambiguity, respect for the sub-

jects of study, persistence, analytical rigour, ac-

curacy, humility, willingness to admit error, and

creativity.

Lectures

Challenge

Reporting

RBL3

RBL1

RBL2RBL4

RBL6RBL5

Figure 10: Vehicle Dynamics course. Teaching design

based on RBL.

Experiments are possible because the new ex-

perimental QoV (HMI). Five experimental sessions

were designed as challenges for the students. Dif-

ferent assignments were considered through each of

the four ways of engaging students in research around

each challenge. A balanced distribution of time

and teaching-learning techniques should give bet-

ter results to different learning styles and academic

topic. Teaching new material in manageable amounts,

through ﬁve challenges, modeling, guiding student

practice, helping students when they made errors, and

providing for sufﬁcient practice and review. Also,

with experiential and hands-on activities after the ba-

sic material was learned. A review is an important

component of instruction between each challenge.

Review can help students strengthen the connections

among the material they have learned. The review

of previous learning can help them recall words, con-

cepts, and procedures effortlessly and automatically

when they need this material to solve problems or to

understand new material. The development of exper-

tise requires thousands of hours of practice, and daily

review is one component of this practice.

An example of teaching design for Challenge #

2, based in Fig. 1, will be described. Students are

organized in collaborative teams of ﬁve members.

1. Research-led: Spent some lectures outlining a

research problem (ER Damper experimental model-

ing) and setting it in a theoretical context based on

the state-of-the-art.

2. Research-oriented: Students must read some

papers to learn about: design of experiments, damper

models and model identiﬁcation. Also, students read

the QoV manual to learn how these ideas can be im-

plemented.

3. Research-based: Students undertake research

by implementing the experiments in the experimental

QoV model through the HMI.

4. Research-tutored: Students must discuss the

used methods/algorithms to solve this challenge, the

main ﬁndings and unresolved issues.

Reporting includes some activities as conse-

quences of the Experiments/Challenges. There are

several important process that students must com-

plete with the experimental results of the challenges,

the most important are: (1) analyze, (2) discuss,

(3) learn/validate concepts, (4) communicate and (5)

write a report. As a result of experimentation to solve

the challenges, analysis of the results to understand

the phenomena and/or generate knowledge. Students

must write a technical report (i.e. abstract, introduc-

tion, state of the art, experimental design, results, dis-

cussion, conclusions, and bibliography). The writ-

ing of this report is justiﬁed by several reasons. For

learning, the act of writing provides a chronology

of thoughts, they can then label, objectify, modify,

or build on; and it engages in becoming invested in

ideas and learning. Writing-to-learn forms and ex-

tends thinking and thus deepens understanding.

Learning is a complex and dynamic process in-

volving interactions between previously acquired lev-

els of understanding and the conceptualization and in-

corporation of new material. Writing a report encour-

ages a level of cognitive activities which maximizes

the potential of the students to modify and restruc-

ture knowledge. Students improve their learning by

constructing and evaluating the knowledge to acquire,

students gain ownership of knowledge by asking their

own questions about existing knowledge. Writing a

report deﬁnitely plays the key role in the process of

student knowledge-construction.

Learning through writing activities and experi-

ences that interest and stimulate students is usually in-

herently motivating. The writing a report activities in-

cluded conceptual understanding, procedural knowl-

edge and logical thinking is a means for transforming

concepts and skills. Writing engaged all students ac-

tively express and explain meaning at their own abili-

ties.

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4.3 Academic Results

The early results of this work should be analyzed from

two perspectives: (1) the academic outcomes and (2)

the results of the didactic proposal using the HMI. Al-

though the results are preliminary, they are motivat-

ing.

Figure 11 presents an example of experimental re-

sults that students obtained. Top plot shows the tran-

sient response of a suspension system using different

damping coefﬁcient. Students can test manually the

ER damper for different electric current and evaluate

the results. Bottom plot shows an road proﬁle esti-

mation system, this experiment is very easy for im-

plementation, but it is a really complex problem for

undergraduate students, (Tud´on-Mart´ınez, 2014). All

students can complete the ﬁve challenges and make

the experience.

About the didactic proposal, based in a survey

with 42 students, the main comments are:

• HMI - Use. Students with basic background in

Matlab/Simulink indicate the HMI is very ease of

use. Students without this background said it is a

good HMI.

• HMI - Academic Purpose. Some students think

they lost the implementation details because the

Plug & Play concept.

• Debugged Software. Students can design, de-

velop, debug and validate their assignments off

line. The experimental implementation was very

short.

• Motivation - QoV Model. All students showed

high motivation; however, some of them are skep-

tics to the real vehicle behavior. Even the QoV

model is an accepted framework for practical ap-

plications; but certainly there are some limita-

tions/constraints because only the vertical dynam-

ics of the vehicle is considered. The scaled proto-

type represents the main concern.

• Motivation - Academic Topic. All students

showed high motivation for being part of a real

problem with an open question.

• Software Reuse. All students appreciated the

available code; some students modify it. Stu-

dents recognized some values: advantage of col-

laboration, recognition of authorship, recognition

of standards procedure as documentation of soft-

ware.

4.4 Related Work

The Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble

(INPG), France has a similiar QoV experimental test

Road profile, z [m]

Experimental data

Estimation

Time [s]

Estimation performance of the road disturbance

−5

−4

−3

−2

−1

x 10

−3

Low dampingMedium dampingHigh damping

Suspension

deflection, z [m]

def

Vehicle dynamics at different damping coefficients

−0.02

−0.015

−0.01

−0.005

0.005

0.01

0.015

0.02

Figure 11: Some experimental results.

bench. They are using the XP Windows HMI, but is

restricted to: (1) limited number of road proﬁles, (2)

General state space based controller, and (3) there are

not real time plots. They have 4 test benches for aca-

demic purposes. Given the restrictions on use, these

equipments are used in a limited way to validate re-

sults.

Also, Gipsa-Lab at INPG has a 1:5-scaled baja

style racing car, which represents a full vehicle in-

cluding wheels, engine, steering, breaking system,

and the key element a SA uspension system, Fig. 12.

This experimental platform has two computers: (1)

Host computer where the user sets the initialization

parameters, conﬁgures the desired road proﬁle, imple-

ments the suspension control algorithms, and records

the acquired data; and (2) Target computer where the

control algorithms are compiled and executed in a RT

operating system (xPC target

). This is an excel-

lent experimental system for research purposes with

a open software. Similar experiments can be done to

our proposal, but the needed time for learning the use

of experimental platform and the needed time for de-

veloping and implementing the tests is excessive high

for educational purposes.

The University of Bundesweher at Munich, Ger-

many has a similar experimental QoV model to us.

Figure 12: 1:5-scaled baja style racing car.

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283

They are researching about chasis control systems

looking for optimal solutions in rough roads. They

developed an HMI based on C++. This platform has

an open code: (1) to interact with sensors and actu-

ators, (2) to implement non conventional controllers,

(3) to design new road proﬁles, (4) to plot simulta-

neously several signals, and (5) to compare real and

simulated results on real time. Similar to Gipsa-Lab

approach, the main purpose is research only.

The essential difference of these related works to

us is: (1) the HMI which was designed for academic

purposes (Plug & Play Approach) based on a teach-

ing technique and (2) the software that support the

HMI, which is the result of two PhD dissertations:

(Lozoya-Santos, 2013), (Tud´on-Mart´ınez, 2014). An

important constraint of our proposal is the cost of the

Dspace

card; however, there are cheaper options.

5 CONCLUSIONS

he proposed educational technology is based on both:

Plug & Play approach and Research Based Learning

(RBL). Early results show the Plug & Play approach

simpliﬁes the used of the experimental QoV model

allowing an efﬁcient teaching-learning system

Preliminary results are: (1) high motivation of stu-

dents, which greatly facilitates the teaching-learning

process, (2) the HMI allowed for experimentation

very efﬁciently, (3) unlike the original course (i.e.

only in a classroom), practical experience taught the

students to ”see”, ”feel”, ”listen” various phenomena

of vertical vehicle dynamics, (4) although we have no

evidence to prove the results of the writing reports,

we believe that the students internalized the concepts

they learned to better understand, organize and com-

municate their ideas (orally and in writing). Our only

evidence is that test scores were substantially higher.

As future work, we will begin to statistically

measure and compare the performance of students

through the terms. Designing rubrics to validate the

beneﬁts of HMI in terms of efﬁciency during the

teaching-learning process.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors thank Tecnol

ogico de Monterrey and CONA-

CyT because their partial support through the Auto-

motive Consorcium Research Group and the Bilateral

(M´exico-France) PCP 03/10 and 06/13.

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