New Perspectives in Science Education

The University of the Basque Country (http://www.ehu.es) is the most important University in the Autonomous Region of the Basque Country, Spain. The students of the Faculty of Engineering (Bilbao) in the last year of their studies, before becoming engineers, have the opportunity to select a block of subjects intended to enhance their knowledge on generally speaking, Fluid Mechanics.

One of the subjects in this stream is called “Management and Maintenance of Hydraulic Systems” and is devoted to different aspects of the water cycle management. In this subject, state-of-the-art operation and management techniques are taught to the students. Apart from the transmission of good practices and standard applied protocols, the focus is practical and is based on hands-on computer real-life exercises, which involves not only intensive programming using a high-level software, but also the spatial representation of results.

Additionally, all the information on water management and associated spatial planning, is usually freely available and made public by regional, national and European institutions using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) standards, usually .shp files. For this reason, students need to effectively read this information, calculate results and finally, yield a spatial representation of the same.

R (https://www.cran.r-project.org/) is a freely available software that provides an optimum answer to these combined  needs and challenges due to its modular structure. R has a core module and nearly 8000 packages specifically developed for different purposes are also available. Packages like “sp” “rgeos”, “rgdal”, “maps”, “maptools” and “mapdata” have been developed to make R work with full functionalities just like any GIS software, while exhibiting all the capabilities of any high-level programming software.

R has been adopted as a standard by many scientific communities and more and more recent developments in the field of water management are defined in the frame of R as gathered in the scientific literature.

Incorporating R into the teaching activities of the subject in the last edition of “Management and Maintenance of Hydraulic Systems” has represented an important step forward in the education of future engineers while providing them with real-life tools used in water management.