Santiago Garcia Espallargas

Background

Santiago Garcia is associate professor in Aerospace Structures and Materials at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering, with a strong interest in what he refers to as curiosity-driven learning. One of the things that Santiago finds most important in his education is that his students engage with the study materials based on intrinsic motivation. It is Santiago’s firm belief that if students are challenged and stimulated in the right way, then not only will deep-learning take place, it will also be experienced as fun. Over the years, Santiago has conducted many educational experiments in order to discover new and better ways to create the learning environment that facilitates curiosity-driven learning and supervised learning beyond the formal course content reducing the mandatory aspects to just ‘passing the exam’. In one experiment, for instance, Santiago implemented the extra activity he names “Discovery Question” in which 1st year BSc students of the Aerospace Materials course decide, supervised in a small team, their own path to learn about the fundamentals of a top-notch topic in the field of aerospace materials and structures which they later on share with other teams for collective learning.

Towards IDEE

Santiago’s interest was instantly piqued when he first heard about IDEE. Both the theme of Students taking responsibility for their own learning process and the theme of Retention of Knowledge and Skills speak to him. What Santiago likes most about IDEE, is that it is a clear recognition of the importance of education for TU Delft, a message that he wholeheartedly agrees with.

Did you know that ...?

• Besides being responsible for a research group working on material surfaces and interfaces, Santiago teaches in 6 courses in the BSc and MSc program at Aerospace Engineering on topics as diverse as Aerospace Materials for BSc students and Functional Coatings and  Self-Healing Materials for MSc students.
• You can find some of the educational strategies explored by Santiago on curiosity-driven education in the recorded Meet and Eat lunch lecture at the Teaching Academy.
• Santiago is looking forward to the piloting phase of IDEE, and is curious to see what the IDEE innovations will bring to his courses.