Playing the role of consultants and contractors emulating a business environment as part of a hybrid undergraduate-graduate engineering course

Role playing is an active learning strategy meant to emulate real-life situations involving the contents of a course. A hybrid undergraduate-graduate course on processes and equipment in microelectronics was offered at UFMG (Brazil), with 60 h of classroom activities. Twenty-one students were enrolled. The course had an initial stage (12 hours) with traditional exposition, by the teacher, of fundamental themes on microelectronics processing. The final stage had the presentation of specific processes by grad students (26 hours). The intermediate stage, however, had the group divided into 04 teams, that exchanged roles as consultants and contractors in subsequent classes. After having studied a pre-Assigned topic for a week, in each meeting, a consultant team worked together with a contractor team, providing solutions to an actual chip processing case presented by the latter. Students reported a very positive learning and engaging experience in the course.