Higher Education engineering students need to be prepared to address sustainable solutions to the complex problems faced in this century. They should become proficient problem solvers, able to work in multidisciplinary teams, ready to adapt to new technologies, and able to acquire new knowledge and skills when needed. Usually known as soft skills, these competences play a key role in Engineering and have being taught in the last two decades, to a greater or lesser extent, using different methodologies and tools. This study reviews the promotion and teaching of soft skills in Higher Education across 5 European countries: Greece, Estonia, Denmark, Portugal and Spain. It provides an overview of best practices on these countries, focusing also on technological solutions to actually enable the development of soft skills. The purpose of this research is to shed some light about how soft skills are being taught presently and the difficulties involved in that process.

Video games have become one of the predominant forms of entertainment in our society, but they have also impacted many other of its social and cultural aspects

In recent years, work-related stress has grown exponentially and the negative impact that this condition has on people’s health is considerable. The effects of work-related stress can be distinguished in those that affect workers (e.g., depression and anxiety) and those that affect the company (e.g., absenteeism and productivity). It is possible to distinguish two types of prevention interventions. Individual interventions aim at promoting coping and individual resilience strategies with the aim of modifying cognitive assessments of the potential stressor, thus reducing its negative impact on health. Mindfulness techniques have been found to be effective stress management tools that are also useful in dealing with stressful events in the workplace. Organizational interventions modify the risk factors connected to the context and content of the work. It was found that a restorative workplace (i.e., with natural elements) reduces stress and fatigue, improving work performance. Furthermore, practicing mindfulness in nature helps to improve the feeling of wellbeing and to relieve stress. In this paper, we review the role of mindfulness-based practices and of contact with nature in coping with stressful situations at work, and we propose a model of coping with work-related stress by using mindfulness in nature-based practices.

This article dwells on the role of gamified digital tools in promoting environmental self-awareness and action. In particular, it unfolds the outreach of a web application, developed within the European GoBeEco project, aimed at encouraging users to adopt ecological and sustainability habits. In this article, the focus is on the implementation of the project in Portugal, and, therefore, the data presented in the results reflect the involvement of participants on a national level. Overall, more than two dozen participants were involved in the validation of the application, which comprised three evaluation phases involving the distribution of questionnaires and the organisation of a focus group aimed at assessing the role of GoBeEco in fostering sustainable personal change and also evaluating specifically the role that gamified elements played in that change. Results show that the application had a very positive impact on the users and helped mitigate the well-documented gap between sustainable awareness and action, and, also, that the gamification strategy contributed to that purpose. We argue that the potential of these applications in Portugal is latent but still has room for growth. In this sense, the study also highlights future paths for the development and implementation of these tools, based on the features most valued by users—access to statistical data, examples from real life, gamified and fun elements, and focus on daily, individual actions, among others.

In Engineering Education, the traditional process of knowledge building was based on one-way (teacher->;student) delivery of information, in classrooms. Students were passive receptors of the teacher's messages. In the past few years, the tendency is to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. The interaction between teacher and students is more dynamic, enhanced by technological tools and includes rich content and flexible activities. The integration of Virtual Environments in Engineering Education allows new and innovative learning methods and is, therefore, a contribution to these new paradigms. This article presents the instantiation of these learning methods with first year engineering students. In our study, students were involved in simulation/gaming environments related to fundamental physics learning. Afterwards their knowledge was tested and their perception of the relevance of the system was evaluated. Results show that knowledge construction was greatly enhanced and that student's motivation for learning was increased.

A simple evaluation question for any educational software is: did the students learn, by using that product, what they were supposed to? It is a simple question to ask, but difficult to answer because learning is an individual process and there are normally too many factors involved. Therefore, benchmarking educational software is a complex task and a complete evaluation process requires a holistic approach where the evaluator, in order to understand how students learn, must determine how and whether the learning objectives were achieved with the educational software. When we talk about Game-Based Learning, we refer to a very specific type of educational software, games, with very definite properties and characteristics. Games develop personal characteristics that can contribute to becoming a good engineer. The purpose of this article is to present an evaluation framework that assesses the efficiency of this pedagogical approach in Engineering Education.