The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) requires the student a more autonomous work. This autonomy is related to the outcome of the self-regulated learning process. The self-regulation involves a self-management skill set coping with any adverse contingency and entails the knowledge of the available abilities and the personal control to put in action those skills. The learning self-regulation serves as a critical process to develop learning to learn competences that enable to transform the mental aptitudes into academic competences. However, it is necessary to make modifications of the learning conditions to achieve it in an adequate way. Thus, the academic authorities should empower skills that facilitate autonomous learning as well as contribute with tools to the student proactivity. In this sense, the problem-based learning is an effective method to facilitate the acquisition of transversal competences. This didactic methodology may be performed in terms of individual or team-based-learning (TBL) that is necessary linked to a teaching-learning open system. An adaptation of the PBL to the thermal engineering studies, the project based learning model, was designed to the ‘Building Energetic Efficiency’ subject of the Research Master

Learning by doing is essential in engineering education, along with topics such as systems automation and control and energy efficiency. This article presents work including all of these different topics. A micro-cogeneration facility located at the University of Vigo is studied. The experimental plant is automated after detecting the most important variables and actuations. A system responsible for the control, supervision, and monitoring of the system was developed using the programming software LabVIEW. All of these processes are explained in depth here. Finally, a complete practice experience is proposed for the next course of the Master of Thermal Engineering programme taught at the University of Vigo. Different tasks are included: the study of the operating principle of a micro-cogeneration system, the analysis of measurement devices and actuators for the automation of an experimental facility, LabVIEW programming, and interaction with the integrated system. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology will be evaluated through a five-point Likert-type scale survey. ß 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 24:723-735, 2016; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary. com/journal/cae;

The methods delineated herein enable students to acquire new knowledge and competences at a high academic level in an independent manner and to demonstrate competence in the current concepts and theories governing energy flows, heat transfer, and energy conversions. These methods have been used in the Energy Thermal Master class that is offered in the Engineering School at the University of Vigo. The study presents an innovative learning method in which two new pedagogical concepts are combined, “learning by doing” and “blended learning,” implying a modernization of the classical learning methods. Using the methodology described below, students are able to operate a biomass experimental as well as use numerous measuring devices to obtain the combustion parameters, which are the latest commercial technology. Furthermore, by using LabVIEW programming, students are able to realize the importance of automation in the facilities and to create a code that is responsible for the control, supervision and monitoring of the system. In addition to the purely experimental aspect, students must analyze the data acquired by LabVIEW, apply their theoretical knowledge and exchange data with other groups, improving their teamwork skills. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:392–403, 2017; View this article online at http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI

The increasing use of smartphone technology in people's daily lives and its continuous development lead to the inevitable use of mobile applications because of their easy access anytime and anywhere. In this study, a new Android application for smartphones is developed and presented for the remote control of a micro‐cogeneration system from a mobile device without the need to be near the system. The mobile application consists of five different windows through which real‐time data on the most important variables of the system can be observed at any time. Additionally, the application allows the user to select the system's desired operating mode among a total of five possibilities. Alarms and warnings are also shown along with the detailed status of the main variables of the groups forming the system. Moreover, the application can graphically show the progression of variables at any time, and a history of the changes to the system is available. An experimental practice based on the “use of current mobile applications” for a subject of the Master of Thermal Engineering is proposed as a pedagogical method that involves the procedure “learning by doing,” in which students can realize the great advantages of using these technologies. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 24:497–507, 2016; View this article online at http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are being used in engineering fields due to multiple advantages that motivate their introduction in university teaching. A course on thermal engineering has been taught for the past 3 years as part of the industrial engineering degree at the University of Vigo. Energy savings and efficiency are common issues. In a practical classroom, one example is the energy simulations of buildings. These tools can be used to simplify the realization of control strategies for different building HVAC systems, which, in most cases, results in an important reduction in the building's energy consumption over its lifetime. In this paper, the feasibility of using the free software GenOpt for simulation practice and as a tool for teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom is analyzed. These results, together with an analysis of the study plan of the industrial engineering degree at the University of Vigo, allow for the development of new teaching and learning methodologies as well as their implementation in energy simulation practice. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 24:356–364, 2016; View this article online at http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI