In this world of the digital era, in which we are living, one of the fundamental competences that students must acquire is the competence in Computational Thinking (CT). Although there is no general consensus on a formal definition, there is a general understanding of it as a set of skills and attitudes necessary for the resolution, with or without a computer, of problems that may arise in any area of life. Measuring and evaluating which of the CT skills students have acquired is fundamental, and for this purpose, previously validated measuring instruments must be used. In this study, a previously validated instrument is applied to know if the new students in the Engineering Degrees of the University of the Basque Country have the following skills in CT: Critical Thinking, Algorithmic Thinking, Problem Solving, Cooperativity and Creativity.
Stimulating students for learning is a regularly recurring theme that never seems finished, remaining in the frontline of teachers' day to day struggle, and this recurrent factor is exponentiated when the subjects are directly related with Mathematics.In November 2018 the European Project EngiMath started work the development of a common Mathematics course for engineering students from the 6 countries of the consortium -Estonia, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain. This course will be an online course with all the usual features and e-contents, however the project partners have been particularly focused on the pedagogical features and real digital competences when developing all the materials and interactive e-contents. An exhaustive search has been developed for the best way to build interactive content that would stimulate students to improve their basic mathematical skills, dealing with all the time and financial constraints, common to European higher education. This paper will describe, in a detailed way, all the steps of the construction of the theoretical contents, in English, which are the basis of the course proposed by the project and that are now being translated to each of the five distinct mother languages to avoid the frequent interpretation misleading problems for students and other cultural hitches. These e-contents are based on the construction of SCORM packages (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) for the Moodle platform, created over animated presentations to promote students' interaction and avoid drop out behaviours.
Embracing tertiary education system represents the beginning of a transition and adjustment period for several students. Most of these have just finished high school where the environment is strictly defined, controlled, stable and attendance is mandatory. Higher Education changes the role of students’ responsibility and this can cause stress and difficulty in the transition to self-directed learning and autonomy promotion. The purpose of this paper is to present an Erasmus+ project that brought together six Higher Education Institutions from different European countries and to describe its current stage. This project aims to develop a shared understanding of engineering mathematics at an early stage of tertiary education and to raise awareness of cultural, professional and educational issues. The initial focus of the work is on the partners’ mutual interest in active learning, particularly the application of Information and Communication Technology in the field of engineering education. When finalised, the project hopes to provide students with a new authentic engineering mathematics subject which meets their needs. This is also the core reason why the on-line course will be composed using innovative pedagogics and ICT tools, as appropriate pedagogics supports students’ procedural, conceptual and application understanding in mathematics and enhances digital competencies, literacy and skills.
Since the end of the 20th century, the digitalization of society, including the educational systems, has been growing exponentially. At the same time, education systems have been evolving towards competency-based assessment. Likewise, at the beginning of this century, the idea of Computational Thinking was resurrected by J. Wing, for solving problems and designing systems using concepts of computer science. Today, we can see how all these questions are taking shape in a new competence, called Computational Thinking, related to others that already exist. In this paper, we have studied the skills of Computational Thinking in university students, focusing on abstraction and its possible relationship with other factors. Results conclude that the students fail in relation to abstraction and in algorithmic thinking. Although the ability of abstraction is not easy to measure, a linear regression analysis has been carried out in order to determine its possible study.
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