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After 10 years of organizing the Cybertech robotics competition, this paper presents this unique and innovative educational experience of teaching engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. Cybertech is not only a well-known robotic contest in Spain due to the Robotaurus bullfighting, but is also a whole academic activity spanning theory, laboratory practical lessons, seminars, tutoring, and a spectacular contest in which robots, developed by the students, compete. It is an open activity, for all students and grades, requiring knowledge of various subjects such as mechanics, microcontrollers, control, and electronics. The experience acquired has shown how this novel educational approach can boost the motivation of students, who in a real applied project effectively learn not only the particular subject matter, but also skills in teamwork, oral presentations, budget management, and so on. This is considered the flagship of innovation in education at UPM. This paper describes the evolution of Cybertech over the past 10 years, summarizes the educational experience, and provides some statistics and results as well as a perspective for future editions of the competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current opinion on undergraduate studies has led to a reformulation of teaching methodologies to base them not just on learning, but also on skills and competencies. In this approach, the teaching/learning process should accomplish both knowledge assimilation and skill development. Previous works demonstrated that a strategy that uses continuous evaluation is able to meet both objectives. However, those studies did not evaluate and quantify the additional effort required to implement such strategies. This paper evaluates the additional instructor effort required when implementing continuous evaluation in a first-year Computer Fundamentals course in the Computer Engineering degree program at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. The experiment quantifies how instructor workload increases under different continuous evaluation strategies and how this affects the overall student grade. Both the “standard” continuous evaluation method and the intensive continuous evaluation method are analyzed, the latter being a proposal that builds upon the standard method by increasing the number of tests and examinations. The results obtained reveal that continuous evaluation improves student grades but that intensive continuous evaluation is liable to generate an excessive instructor overload without having a significant impact on student scores. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation of the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA), with the corresponding changes in the structure and content of university degrees, offers a great opportunity to review learning methodologies. This paper investigates the effect on students of moving from a traditional learning process, based on lectures and laboratory work, to an approach closer to continuous evaluation. To this end, various types of weekly assessments were included in a Distributed Information Systems course; these assessments and the teacher's feedback were both intended to increase students' participation in the learning process. Data for seven academic years have been compiled, representing a total of more than 750 students. Analysis of the results established that most students preferred to participate in the course following the new methodology. Although both the pass rate and the final students' grades improved, the percentage of students dropping out of the course increased slightly. The impact of carrying out the proposed assessments was the same, regardless of gender and whether the student had taken this course before. In addition, compulsory attendance at office hours did not impact the degree of student participation in the new methodology. Finally, it was found that the greater (more continuous) effort demanded by the new methodology had an effect on the teacher's evaluation, whose scores were slightly lower with the new methodology, even though the students' performed better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many engineering programs in Europe, the final part of most Swedish software engineering programs is a longer project in which the students write a Master's thesis. These projects are often conducted in cooperation between a university and industry, and the students often have two supervisors, one at the university and one in industry. In particular, the Bologna Process that is currently underway to align different higher educational programs in Europe discusses industrial Master's theses as a major type of thesis project. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how best to support these projects and the different stakeholders involved. This paper presents a study where students and supervisors from software engineering Master's thesis projects at three different Swedish universities are interviewed. The intention of the study is to explore what the major problems of different stakeholders are during a project and to investigate what type of support is needed. Based on the interview results, a support model is defined, which outlines the different types of support that are needed for different roles in Master's thesis projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a practical experience of adapting the teaching of a course in Computer Technology (CT) to the new demands of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). CT is a core course taught in the first year of the degree program Technical Engineering in Management Computing in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña (UDC), Spain. The contents of this course are mainly devoted to the design of digital systems. The main purpose of the adaptation has been to focus more on students, clearly defining the abilities they will develop during the course and suggesting activities that facilitate the development of those abilities. The aim of this work is to describe how this adaptation was performed, the materials and activities prepared, the difficulties encountered, the goals achieved and the response of students and teachers to these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]