The Physics Department of Technical University of Catalonia obtained the project PhyTracer: Physics as Tracer of Teaching Innovation Actions, funded by the same UPC in the mark of Galàxia Aprenentatge call 2024
Jun 06, 2025
Physics plays a foundational role in engineering education, providing the essential principles that underpin nearly all areas of engineering practice—from mechanics and thermodynamics to electromagnetism and modern materials science. Teaching physics effectively within engineering degrees is crucial for developing students' problem-solving skills, analytical thinking, and deep conceptual understanding necessary for innovative and practical engineering solutions
To improve the effectiveness of physics instruction, the field of Physics Education Research (PER) has emerged as a vital area of scholarly inquiry. PER investigates how students learn physics, how instructors teach it, and how educational environments and tools can be optimized. One of the major research lines in PER include the Conceptual understanding and misconceptions: studying how students grasp or misinterpret core physics concepts.
The Technical University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech (UPC) is one of Europe’s leading technical universities, located in Catalonia, Spain. Renowned for its excellence in engineering, architecture, science, and technology, UPC is a hub for innovation, research, and academic rigor.
With the aim of continuously improving its teaching, the UPC started the initiative Galàxia Aprenentatge (GA) aimed at supporting strategic projects that seek to transform the educational and learning processes within the university.
The Physics Department of the UPC obtained within the GA24 call the project PhyTracer: Physics as Tracer of Teaching Innovation Actions with a budget of 100 kϵ and 2 years of duration (2024-2026). PhyTracer, which principal investigators are Claudia Grossi and Muriel Botey, aims to use first year physics education as a catalyst for pedagogical transformation across the university. The project will be carried out in collaboration with Physics 1 professors of ETSEIB (Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering), EEBE (Barcelona East School of Engineering) and FNB (Faculty of Nautical Sciences of Barcelona) UPC’s schools.
PhyTracer wants also to promote, within the same DFIS department, a new research line in the PER field. Actually the PhD project of Marina Ristol (pre-doctoral student of the UPC doctoral program in Engineering, Science and Technology Education), supervised by Claudia Grossi and David Pino, will focus on ‘Identifying and Addressing Physics Misconceptions in Final-Year High School and First-Year Engineering Students’
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