Aoife Ahern is Head of the School of Civil Engineering in University College Dublin. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in civil engineering and a PhD from University College London and has been a lecturer, first in TCD and later in UCD since 2000. She also holds a professional diploma in Teaching and Learning. Her primary research area is transport engineering but over the last 18 years, she has developed a strong interest in teaching, education and engineering; in particular, she has been engaged in both national and international research projects looking at how Critical Thinking can be taught and defined in the university curriculum and in engineering education. Caroline Dominguez is a professor at the Engineering Department of the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro in Portugal, where she lectures business/industrial management. She is a member of CIDTFF (Didactics and Technology in Education of Trainers) and CETRAD (Transdisciplinary Studies for Development) research centers where she leads and participates in national and international funded projects (at present coordinating the Crithinkedu Eramsus + European funded project). Her main research interest and publications (ORCID nº: 0000-0002-8486-4142) are on educational issues (critical thinking) as well as project, quality, lean and human resources management. Before pursuing an academic career, she was the head manager of organizations dealing with development issues in Peru and Portugal, where she developed and implemented various international funded projects. Ciaran McNally is a civil engineer and holds a PhD from University College Dublin. His primary research interests relate to construction materials and he has been coordinator of several projects at a national and European level. He also holds a professional diploma in teaching and learning. John O'Sullivan is a Civil Engineer from Trinity College Dublin, and holds a Masters Degree from Queen's University Belfast and a PhD from the University of Ulster. He has been a lecturer in the UCD School of Civil Engineering since 2001. Although his primary research interests relate to environmental hydraulics and hydrology, he has a long-held interest in teaching and pedagogic innovation. He holds a professional Certificate in Teaching and Learning and serves on the School's Teaching and Learning Committee. Daniela Pedrosa is a Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Developing optimum solutions to engineering problems typically relies on structured and complex thought processes that require evaluation, interpretation and opinion. Well-developed critical thinking (CT) skills are essential for dealing with the multi-dimensional nature of these problems. CT in an engineering context is well reported in teaching and learning academic literature. However, much of this is framed within theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Practical approaches of how CT skills are best promoted in engineering curricula are less common. A state-of-art review of practical interv...

Abstract. The SimProgramming teaching approach has the goal to help students overcome their learning difficulties in the transition from entry-level to advanced computer programming and prepare them for real-world labour environments, adopting learning strategies. It immerses learners in a businesslike learning environment, where students develop a problem-based learning activity with a specific set of tasks, one of which is filling weekly individual forms.We conducted thematic analysis of 401 weekly forms, to identify the students' strategies for self-regulation of learning during assignment. The students are adopting different strategies in each phase of the approach. The early phases are devoted to organization and planning, later phases focus on applying theoretical knowledge and hands-on programming. Based on the results, we recommend the development of educational practices to help students conduct self-reflection of their performance during tasks.

The goal of the SimProgramming approach is to help students overcome their learning difficulties in the transition from entry-level to advanced computer programming, developing an appropriate set of learning strategies. We implemented it at the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (Portugal), in two courses (PM3 and PM4) of the bachelor programmes in Informatics Engineering and ICT. We conducted semi-structured interviews with students (n=38) at the end of the courses, to identify the students' strategies for self-regulation of learning in the assignment. We found that students changed some of their strategies from one course edition to the following one and that changes are related to the SimProgramming approach. We believe that changes to the educational approach were appropriate to support the assignment goals. We recommend applying the SimProgramming approach in other educational contexts, to improve educational practices by including techniques to help students in their learning.

Abstract.To motivate students to study advanced programming techniques, including the use of architectural styles such as the model-view-controller pattern, we have conducted action research upon a project based-learning approach. In addition to collaboration, the approach includes students' searching and analysis of scientific documents and their involvement in communities of practice outside academia. In this paper, we report the findings of second action research cycle, which took place throughout the fourth semester of a six-semester program. As with the previous cycle during the previous academic year, students did not satisfactorily achieve expected learning outcomes. More groups completed the assigned activities, but results continue to reflect poor engagement in the communities of practice and very low performance in other learning tasks. From the collected data we have identified new approaches and recommendations for subsequent research.Keywords: motivation; learning programming; collaboration; social interaction; communities of practice; project-based learning; problem-based learning. IntroductionFor students following a software engineering study program, learning object-oriented programming approaches for system development with well-structured coding is a complex challenge [1,2]. During introductory programming courses, typically students become able to develop small programs, as well as adapt and combine pieces of existing code, but they do not clearly understand the importance of writing well-structured code from pre-existing structures such as frameworks, libraries, and application programming interfaces (API) [3]. In more advanced programming situations -for example, involving the use of architectural styles such as model-view-controller (MVC) [4,5] -students need to develop a set of complex skills [3]. Furthermore, besides the programming skills required to apply such best practices during system development, students also need to develop social skills in order to collaborate with other developers as part of the teamwork-based process for developing large, complex software systems. Literature addressing engineering education has reported that current learning approaches do not align with the professional practice required by the labor market [6,7]. These approaches are narrowly focused upon the acquisition of technical knowledge supported by heavy workloads and promote a meritocracy of difficulty-based belief system instead of prioritizing active learning and integrating knowledge, skills more aligned with professional realities [8,9,10,11].The pedagogical context in which students learn influences their engagement and resolve to achieve learning outcomes [12,13], and much research has examined approaches to the above described problem employing project-based learning (PBL) and teamwork environments [14,15,16]. While engineering problems are designed so that multiple solutions of varying mathematical and scientific sophistication are possible, teamwork skills and both oral and written communic...