Work in progress - Cooperative and competitive projects for engaging students in advanced ICT subjects

In this paper we present a specific kind of projects that can be used for project-based learning in engineering subjects. The subjects must combine lectures with projects, in order to provide the technical competences together with additional skills such as teamwork learning, oral and written communication skills and application of theory to practice. The projects proposed consist on improving an elemental baseline system. The system is decomposed in modules that correspond to the topics that have been learnt during the lectures. For improving the system, the class is divided in groups and each group has to propose, implement, assess and report a better system. In order to be able to improve the system with a limited amount of time and effort the students need to make a coherent proposal and split the project in several tasks that are usually developed by one or two students. The students within a group cooperate to achieve a better system, but groups compete for the best results. We have already implemented this kind of project in a Speech Processing course and we plan to apply it in a Video Coding course.