Context: Cyber physical systems are getting pervasive in our every-day life. For their development the industry needs highly-qualified and skilled employees. The employees need to have a wide breadth of knowledge in many engineering disciplines and possess excellent soft skills. Ideally, the needed skills are taught in practical settings. Problem: The versatility of the problems in development of cyber physical systems poses a challenge for the teaching. A common approach to teaching software engineering concepts is to have students form teams to create a software product; this allows them to experience the problems first hand. However, this approach, compared with "traditional" software engineering and software development, is much more difficult for cyber-physical systems, due to the need to have a wide understanding in multiple engineering fields. At the same time, the education of engineering concepts lack on teaching of soft skills that are often key success factors for engineering projects. Approach: We developed a novel task-centric holistic agile approach on teaching cyber physical systems. The concept is task-centric concluding five teaching approaches that may be used when needed. The concept focuses the teaching of technical skills and soft skills. Result: The proposed concept allows students to have an insight into the difficulties involved in development of cyberphysical systems from multiple points of view in a realistic way. Conclusion: The holistic agile approach on teaching cyber physical systems has the potential to reinforce conceptual instruction with hands-on learning at a fraction of the time and cost that would be required to run a true cyber-physical systems development project.

University–Business partnership for collaborative curriculum design, development, and delivery is an important dimension of University–Business Collaboration (UBC), but scarce information exists on how to enhance partnership for the design, development, and implementation of new curricula. With these questions in focus, this article intends to present and discuss the perceived experience during a three-year European funded project, namely, Think4Jobs. This project exemplifies the significance and benefits of UBC in the design, development, and delivery of curricula that meet the evolving demands of the labour market while promoting Critical Thinking (CT) as a foundational 21st century skill to contribute to graduates’ employability. Think4Jobs project brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers and business organisations from five European countries (Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, and Romania) with interests in promoting and developing CT and mitigating eventual competence gaps. The project’s success was attributed to key practices, including defining a common conceptualization of CT, employing Participatory Co-Design, and providing common training for university and business partners. Clear objectives, explicit roles, effective communication, and ongoing evaluation further enhanced the collaboration. Experiential learning, real-work problems, and case studies reinforced the curricula, bridging the gap between academia and the labour market. By embracing these insights, future UBC initiatives can empower graduates with the necessary skills to stand out in an ever-changing labour market, contributing to enhanced education and successful careers.

Critical thinking (CT) is one of the most important 21st-century skills that employers believe will grow in prominence. However, many higher education (HE) graduates often lack it. This is also true for graduates in computer science (CS) and related disciplines, who need CT to drive social and organizational digitalization. There are a number of strategies for teaching CT. However, there is no evidence regarding how to effectively teach CT in CS. To address this gap, this study proposes an educational approach that aims to promote CT to the students of CS and related disciplines. An educational experiment using this approach was conducted in two modules with similar content. The written reflections of 11 students on their development in CT and the quantitative data of students’ self-assessments of their CT skills and dispositions before (N = 20) and after (N = 11) the experiment were analyzed. Priority was given to the qualitative data. The results of this study support the hypothesis that the proposed approach has a positive impact on the development of students’ perceived CT skills. They also show that this approach stimulates and promotes students’ ability to transfer CT to other tasks and domains and to other contexts and situations. However, the positive development of students’ CT dispositions could not be demonstrated in this study, which can be explained by the short duration of this intervention.

Cyber physical systems (CPS) involve physical and cyber components seamlessly integrated one into another. With the current technical and technological developments CPS are getting increasingly pervasive in multiple spheres of society. CPS are laying on the edge between engineering and information technology. In both cases CPS becoming more and more complex. This complexity constitutes a great challenge for the industry. For development of CPS highly-qualified and skilled employees are needed. In this paper we introduce the results of a literature review with the focus on the two main questions: 1) what are competences of CSP engineers needed by the industry today; and 2) which of these are addressed by the academia and how they are addressed.

Cyber physical systems (CPS) consist of physical and cyber components seamlessly integrated with each other. Being a core and an essential component within the digitalization process, CPS are becoming pervasive in all spheres of modern society. Understanding CPS structures and associated functionalities requires a multidisciplinary body of knowledge and engineering capabilities. Moreover, they are laying on the edge of a broad spectrum of methodologies and technologies, from mechatronics, communication, control and automation to information technologies, which are penetrating each corner of the society. It is obvious from the lifecycle of CPS, i.e., life cycle of the physical-part and the digital thread of the cyber-part, that developers, operators and managers of CPS have to acquire an essential interdisciplinary engineering qualification and a combination of skills and competencies from many different disciplines, including social and psychological aspects, among others. In order to develop and implement an adequate educational programme, two major aspects have been analysed in this paper: (i) identification and understanding of the minimal set of multidisciplinary competencies and qualifications needed and (ii) identification and classification of the critical gaps in the existing engineering curricula. The analysis is based on the findings of a survey conducted in two IEEE conferences closely related to the engineering disciplines associated with CPS.