This paper describes a pedagogical assignment based on a cooperative work involving teachers/students from two Portuguese universities. As it happens one is the oldest in the country – University of Coimbra (UC) - and the other the largest - University of Porto (UP), about 120 km apart. The authors, believing in the relevance of Information and Communication Technologies (ITs) in teaching/learning methodologies and in cooperative teaching methods worked together to plan this pedagogical experience and to run it in a one semester course. Students from UC have been introduced to the remote lab at UP and got the first contact with the remote experiments using easily available sound and image resources based on Skype and an IP camera for better image quality. This first contact has been conducted by the first author at UP with support of the second author at UC. The work will describe briefly the remote experiments used, their inclusion in the course at UC, the associated assessment criteria and, finally, student comments

Engineering education is facing a changing world in which how one thinks is becoming more important than what one thinks; that is, our course content is important but constantly changing and we need to help students learn how to think about that content.Today’s students have grown accustomed to immediate rewards, multi-channel stimuli, and rapid-fire communications.  As a result, they are often impatient and suffer a lack of focus. When reflection is called for in the learning process - a time consuming practice - students may find it difficult to overcome the conflict between their typically speedy management of priorities and the focused, time-intensive thinking required to acquire a strong foundation of declarative knowledge.Therefore, the exploration of tools to facilitate the formation of deep knowledge structures is essential. One instructional strategy that shows promise is the use of concept mapping, a learning activity that requires students to explain their understanding of important ideas and the relationships among those ideas.  This paper describes a pilot project to integrate concept mapping into a Mechanical Engineering Course and the preliminary results of that project.This project has been established within the Working Group of “Tools for Developing High Order Thinking Skills”, of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education, in which the first author is the leader and the other two co-authors, are working group member

Universidade Júnior is a very large educational program for the promotion of knowledge among pre-university children and teenagers launched in 2005 by U.Porto. This extremely popular initiative is currently attracting around 5000 students per year for a variety of learning activities and small research projects offered by the 14 Faculties of U.Porto during July and September. Besides providing a foretaste of university life and vocational orientation, they also give the youngsters a strong incentive to continue their studies into higher education and a knowledge-based career. A key element to the success of this process is the mentoring activity that is developed at two levels: between faculty and the junior tutors and between these and the young students

The increasing use of emergent technologies in industry, medicine, research, training and education attests to the relevance of their integration in teaching/learning approaches. Online experimentation comprises remote and virtual experimentation also supported and complemented by other online tools that incorporate necessarily the use of emergent technologies. The present work synthesizes the final outcomes of a project aiming to develop, use and disseminate Online Experimentation, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Some application examples are given to illustrate the use of online experimentation on different contexts, such as secondary and higher education (STEM), lifelong learning or industrial training.

Abstract-Nowadays there is a huge diversity of multimedia tools available for helping to make concepts more easily and objectively understood. Such tools may be instrumental in science and technology for establishing very suggestive connections between theoretical models and the corresponding real life phenomena. An effective use of these tools in the form of short video clips linking experimental laboratory evidence with natural events is illustrated in this work.