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Presently, higher education institutions are faced with the challenge of developing student's abilities and skills needed in their future workplace. In what concerns technological skills, the use of spreadsheets for calculations, analysis of data and forecasting is a common and important practice in companies. Particularly, the MS Excel software is widely used by professionals from all fields. In this sense, Economic, Business and Marketing graduates need competencies in forecasting methods, extremely useful for decision-making processes. It thus becomes imperative to implement pedagogical practices to encourage students to use these technological tools. The later will promote the development of competencies in forecasting methods to solve future real problems. In this paper, we attempt to address these issues by analysing the MS Excel software capabilities as a teaching tool in a forecasting methods course. It was proposed to the students to carry out a learning project involving statistical concepts, namely linear regression, performed in MS Excel. We examine the performance and engagement of two samples of students with different backgrounds and from distinct realities. One group is composed of ERASMUS' students from several nationalities and fields of study and other group consists of Portuguese students of the Marketing Bachelor degree, both enrolled in an optional course of the bachelor degree in Marketing taught at Porto Accounting and Business School from Polytechnic of Porto. The effectiveness of this approach is shown through the analysis of results of students' projects. We verify that students in both groups achieved the task proposed goals and applied appropriately the required concepts in an engaged way.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution era has arrived, according to the World Economic Forum. Everything is changing (viz., artificial intelligence, automation, intelligent robots, self-driving cars and genetic editing) and exciting opportunities accompanied with major challenges come to the surface. On the other hand, major difficulties may also rise, namely technological unemployment and poverty. How can governments, educators and parents prepare the present and future generations to thrive in this increasingly changing world? What is the Education of the Fourth Industrial Revolution age? The education of the new era must transform itself to be able to provide students with the scientific and soft skills needed in the 21st century. Students must actively apply and update their knowledge, must be critical thinkers, problem solvers, curious, imaginative, collaborative, communicators. As Alvin Toffler says in his book Future Shock (1970) ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.’ DrIVE-MATH—Development of Innovative Mathematical Teaching Strategies in European Engineering Degrees’ virtual team was designed to develop a novel and integrated framework to teach math classes in engineering courses, at the university level. Its major goal is to apply novel teaching methodologies to teach math courses to future engineers. DrIVE-MATH emerged from the need to prepare and develop essential competences in engineering students, key to their success in the rapidly changing and dynamic workplace. The teachers involved in the project strongly believe that the implemented active-learning methodologies provide better scientific and soft skills support to the future engineers. In this paper, we present the results of the first year (pilot) implementation of the project DrIVE-MATH at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto.