Fermi Problems: Mathematical Modeling from Laboratory Online Synchronous Experiences for Engineering Students

The virtuality was seen as an obstacle to the possibility of experimentation, as well as communicative interactions between educational actors, the significant practices of scientific activity. Within this framework, various alternatives were sought to emulate laboratory classes, especially physics, in which experimentation is essential to develop theoretical knowledge from a tangible experience. This article presents a learning experience that uses Fermi estimation as a discursive alternative for magnitude modeling. Activities carried out in sessions that promoted interaction between peers through chat through the Blackboard Collaborate platform. From this framework, it seeks to present a characterization of the interactions that occurred in the online learning sessions, based on the Fermi problems. The information collected was processed through the construction of bigrams, which allow visualizing semantic relationships or nodes between terms, characterizing the type of interactions that occurred in the development of the class. The results allow to recognize categories of analysis, difficulties, and challenges to develop a virtual experimentation that favors the competences of scientific thought.