European Mobility Programmes promoted by the European Commission have propelled a significant change in students’ mobility across Europe in the last few decades. The European Project Semester (EPS) is one of those programmes. Research has mainly focused on understanding the factors that shape students’ decision to engage in mobility experiences but has not tackled the motivation(s) leading them to opt for that programme in a particular country at a specific institution. This paper aims to understand EPS students’ motivation to elect this programme for their mobility at a particular country/city/institution and hence contribute to help institutions define policies and practices to attract more students to this specific programme. Carried out at the Polytechnic School of Engineering in Porto, a mixed research methodology was followed, considering qualitative and quantitative data equally, and a theoretical framework was devised based on the push–pull factors model. Seventy-seven students participated in the study by filling in a closed-question questionnaire and engaging in focus group sessions. The findings sustained previous research and highlighted that students’ motivation is supported by a combination of factors (personal, professional, academic), among which the personal category was the highest rated. These results show that the motivations for choosing the EPS programme do not differ considerably from those leading students to undertake regular mobility.

The Informatics Engineering degree at ISEP, aligned with international standards, was the first undergraduate degree in Portugal to be certified with EUR-ACE®. The programme emphasizes project-based learning, in which students, working in teams, develop interdisciplinary projects applying knowledge from all courses in each semester. A specific laboratory-project course coordinates an integrative project that aims to address complex problems. In the 2nd semester, two computer engineering courses (object-oriented programming and software engineering), and two mathematics courses (discrete mathematics and statistics) are involved, besides the laboratory/project course. This paper focuses on the integration of mathematics with informatics courses in this project, addressing real-world-like problems, bridging software engineering with mathematical topics. To assess the adopted PBL, enquiries were carried out among students. This approach fosters active learning and reinforces the relevance of mathematics within engineering, preparing students for job market demands.