Résumé
This article presents a return of experience of a collaborative educational approach put in place to build a new course about the test of Printed Circuits Boards (PCB). This course was dedicated to 5 th year engineer apprentice students from Montpellier Polytech School. The teaching method followed the " problem-based learning " (PBL) approach, which is a student-centered pedagogy: the students learn in-group about a topic (knowledge and know-how) through the experience of solving an open-ended problem proposed by the teacher. This approach targets two types of objectives: technical with the learning of PCB test methods and educational with the learning of thinking strategies, decision-making, negotiation and collaborative work. A course evaluation form has been created, based on the F2A Lou-vain University one, to help the students providing classifiable feedback about this " problem based learning " approach. In 2014-2015, a new course relative to printed circuit boards (PCB) testing has been added to the syllabus of the 5 th year Embedded Systems curricula of Polytech Montpellier engineering school. 5 th year Embedded Systems students are engineer apprentices students who, since the 3 rd year at Poly-tech school, spend half of a month attending courses and studying and, the remaining half working for a company. In order to position them in a teaching context close to their real world working, the teacher freshly trained to problem-based learning approach from Louvain University teachers [1] decided to apply this student-centered pedagogy to the PCB testing course. Students would learn in-group about a topic (knowledge and know-how) through the experience of solving an open-ended problem proposed by the teacher. The choice of the problem-based active teaching approach was appropriated to motivate the students elaborating a learning strategy where they were protagonists of their learning and the teach-er's role was only to guide them to be skilled before the visit of a PCB manufacturing and test plant organized in order to compensate the lack of lab material for practice. This paper presents a return of experience of the " problem based learning " (PBL) approach developed to teach PCB testing and is composed of several sections. Section II is dedicated to the description of the context of PCB manufacturing and test. Section III briefly introduces the Electrical Engineering department of Polytech Montpellier engineering school. Section IV presents the problem-based learning approach concepts , its process phases, its organization and the impacts on the teacher's role. Then section IV describes how the PBL concepts have been applied to the PCB testing course and the technical and pedagogical objectives. Section V presents the outcome of this new student-centered teaching method while the section VI states about the required preparation to implement this collaborative approach and the improvements that could be applied. Section VII is the conclusion of this return experience of collaborative learning and the perspectives.