Jupyter notebooks provide an interactive programming environment that allows writing code, text, equations, and multimedia resources. They are widely used as a teaching support tool in computer science and engineering courses. However, manual grading programming assignments in Jupyter notebooks is a challenging task, thus using an automatic grader becomes a must. This paper presents UNCode notebook auto-grader, that offers summative and formative feedback instantaneously. It provides instructors with an easy-to-use grader generator within the platform, without having to deploy a new server. Additionally, we report the experience of employing this tool in two artificial intelligence courses: Introduction to Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning. Several programming activities were carried out using the proposed tool. Analysis of students’ interactions with the tool and the students’ perceptions are presented. Results showed that the tool was widely used to evaluate their tasks, as a large number of submissions were performed. Students expressed positive opinions mostly, giving feedback about the auto-grader, highlighting the usefulness of the immediate feedback and the grading code, among other aspects that helped them to solve the activities. Results remarked on the importance of providing clear grading code and formative feedback to help the students to identify errors and correct them.

This article presents the design, implementation and appraisal of an educational intervention developed to explore how education, practice and feedback of cognitive elements, regarding writing summaries, have an effect on the technical writing competence of freshman engineering students. The educational intervention was designed based on the methodol-ogy of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and it consisted of three phases: teaching, practice and feedback. In total, 177 students participated, distributed into three groups: 54 Electronic Engineering students (year 2014), 57 Electrical Engineering students (year 2015) and 66 Electronic Engineering students (year 2015). The intervention effects were studied by quantitative and qualitative evidence. Quantitative evidence was collected through an evaluation rubric of the summaries written by the students; this rubric analyzes ten criteria of the writing competence. Qualitative evidence was collected through open-ended questions about the students’ learning experience throughout the intervention. Results show that the three partici-pating groups improved their technical writing competence due to their participation in this educational intervention. Sen-tence construction (g-Hedges = 0,62) and text sequences (g-Hedges = 0,59) criterion presented the highest effect rates. The other writing criteria, evaluated through the rubric, presented a positive gain with statistical significance, but only in some groups of students.

Accreditation processes not only recognize the high quality of curricular programs; they also guarantee their continuous self-improvement. This paper aims to socialize the curricular experiences in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering programs of Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá Campus) within the decade-long efforts to achieve international ABET accreditation in 2021. This work thoroughly describes the implementation of the CDIO curriculum design methodology and its subsequent transition towards a curricular assessment based on learning outcomes. The results of some qualitative studies regarding the perceptions of faculty and alumni are presented, as well as a detailed proposal of the skills to be developed in each year of the syllabus, establishing their level of implementation. Moreover, a detailed description is provided regarding the methodology adopted for measuring performance indices during four semesters and the main results of the assessment of each learning outcome. Finally, the main curricular challenges to be addressed over the following years within the Electrical and Electronics Engineering programs are described.

An international association advancing the multidisciplinary study of informing systems. Founded in 1998, the Informing Science Institute (ISI) is a global community of academics shaping the future of informing science.

La realización de este estudio responde a la necesidad de diseñar ambientes académicos que mejoren la adquisición de los conceptos en ingeniería que resultan a veces abstractos y limitan su comprensión. Utilizando metodologías cualitativas, se explora cuáles son los principales factores que los estudiantes refieren cuando evalúan las clases de ingeniería con el propósito de establecer elementos comunes entre las clases consideradas como destacadas. Para tal fin, las evaluaciones abiertas realizadas a profesores de ingeniería de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia fueron codificadas y analizadas para encontrar los temas subyacentes a categorías previamente identificadas en la literatura psicológica. Adicionalmente, se compararon los conteos de frecuencias en estos factores entre los profesores ubicados en el primer y último grupo de la evaluación cuantitativa. Los resultados mostraron que los estudiantes consideraban, dentro de la categoría de metodología, factores asociados a la evaluación, a la dinámica de clase y a la participación, y a la organización de tiempos y espacios. Finalmente, dentro de la categoría de huella docente, los estudiantes incluyeron la dedicación y el compromiso del docente, el nivel de asertividad, y la motivación y actitud. Todos estos factores diferenciaban el primer del último grupo.