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.
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