Publications related to Soft skills

How to Support Students to Cultivate Psychological Safety in their Teams

Francesco Mondada, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali

The importance of psychological safety in teams has been demonstrated in different settings. Team performance improves when team climate allows team members to be their authentic selves, to ask questions and raise concerns comfortably. However, it is less ...

EPFL2024

Generative AI-Enabled Conversational Interaction to Support Self-Directed Learning Experiences in Transversal Computational Thinking

Denis Gillet, Juan Carlos Farah, Adrian Christian Holzer, Abdessalam Ouaazki

As computational thinking (CT) becomes increasingly acknowledged as an important skill in education, self-directed learning (SDL) emerges as a key strategy for developing this capability. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) conversational agents has disrup ...

2024

How to support students to develop coaching and peer teaching skills

Siara Ruth Isaac, Joelyn de Lima

Students learn more when they are actively engaged in the learning process. While hands-on activities, labs and projects are moments when students are active, the learning benefits can be amplified with coaching strategies. This activity will enable studen ...

EPFL2024

The development, validation and use of an interprofessional project management questionnaire in engineering education

Roland John Tormey, Marc Laperrouza

Professional skills of project planning, risk analysis, ethical design, communication, and working in interprofessional teams are now recognised as core engineering skills. Frequently, they are addressed in engineering education through team projects. Howe ...

2023

From University to Work: Alumni Viewpoints

Patrick Jermann, Helena Kovacs, Iris Capdevila Tristan

Alumni studies are often overlooked in engineering education research, despite holding great potential for improving engineering programmes and creating the links that are missed when it comes to university-workplace transitions. Besides better understandi ...

NTNU SEED2023

Are engineering teachers ready to leverage the power of play to teach transversal skills?

Roland John Tormey, Siara Ruth Isaac, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali, Natascia Petringa

What conceptions do teachers hold about learning activities to develop students’ transversal skills? This qualitative exploration at a research-intensive engineering school draws on interviews and focus groups to explore teachers’ ideas about developing in ...

2023

The iReCheck project: using tablets and robots for personalised handwriting practice

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, David Cohen

Handwriting is an important skill in children development as well as in education that take years to be mastered. While keyboards and similar technological devices increasingly become more popular, new tools and engaging approaches are also required to kee ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Location is a major barrier for transferring US fossil fuel employment to green jobs

Michaël Aklin

The green energy revolution may displace 1.7 million fossil fuel workers in the US but a Just Transition to emerging green industry jobs offers possibilities for re-employing these workers. Here, using 14 years of power plant data from the US Energy Inform ...

Nature Research2023

Hands-on tasks make learning visible: a learning analytics lens on the development of mechanistic problem-solving expertise in makerspaces

Richard Lee Davis, Bertrand Roland Schneider

This study investigated the impact of participating in a year-long digital-fabrication course on high-school seniors' problem-solving skills, with a focus on problems involving mechanistic systems. The research questions centered on whether working in a ma ...

Springer2023

Digital Intervention for Collaborative and Human-Centered Activities in Design-Based Learning Scenarios

Denis Gillet, Isabelle Barbara Marie-Hélène Cardia

Training science and engineering students to become responsible citizens and professionals requires novel and creative pedagogical approaches, such as design thinking. This concept relies on processes and tools to develop creativity and problem-solving ski ...

IEEE2023

Towards real-world biomechanical analysis of performance and functional capacity using wearable sensors

Salil Apte

Today, wearable heart rate monitors are an integral part of runners' training sessions, with heart rate data routinely used to assess effort intensity and stress on the body. As athletes translate their physical capacity into performance on the field throu ...

EPFL2022

Engineering of Existing Structures: The Need and Place for Non-destructive Evaluation

Eugen Brühwiler, Numa Joy Bertola, Thomas Schumacher

Structural engineers today are still educated mainly to design new structures. This ignores the fact that structures already exist and need to be maintained. Students are thus often ill-equipped to deal with maintenance and preservation of existing structu ...

2022

Do Children Adapt Their Perspective to a Robot When They Fail to Complete a Task?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Elmira Yadollahi, Ana Paiva

Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others' spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first st ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

Detecting Latent Training Needs Using Large Datasets

Ramtin Yazdanian

In today's world, there is no shortage of disruptors acting on various professional domains. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, with its AI-driven and automation-focused technologies, has fundamentally changed many domains -- particularly the Information an ...

EPFL2022

midiVERTO: A Web Application to Visualize Tonality in Real Time

Daniel Harasim, Fabian Claude Moss

This paper presents a web application for visualizing the tonality of a piece of music-the organization of its chords and scales-at a high level of abstraction and with coordinated playback. The application applies the discrete Fourier transform to the pit ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2022

Facilitators First: Building a Tool With Facilitators to Foster a More Collaborative Makerspace Community Through Movement Traces

Bertrand Roland Schneider, Léonore Valentine Guillain

Research indicates that makerspaces equip students with the practical skills needed to build their own projects and thrive in the twenty-first-century workforce. While the appeal of makerspaces lies in their spirit of tinkering and community-driven ethos, ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

Teachers’ Reasons to Join a Community About Educational Robotics and STEAM: A Swiss Experience

Sophia Reyes Mury

Today we live in a digital society that requires the acquisition of new skills related to computer science, such as computational thinking or coding skills, as well as cross-curricular skills, such as communication, collaboration and creativity. A possible ...

Springer, Cham2021

Promoting Critical and Design Thinking Activities to Tackle Sustainable Development Goals in Higher Education

Denis Gillet, Isabelle Barbara Marie-Hélène Cardia

Since 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came into force, and for the first time they include higher education. Therefore, higher institutions are finding ways to incorporate them into their teachings and research activities. This paper cont ...

IEEE2021

Automated Design: A Journey Across Modelling, Optimization, and Education

Cyril Picard

Machine intelligence greatly impacts almost all domains of our societies. It is profoundly changing the field of mechanical engineering with new technical possibilities and processes. The education of future engineers also needs to adapt in terms of techni ...

EPFL2021

Which professional skills do students learn in engineering team-based projects?

Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Roland John Tormey, Cécile Hardebolle, Cyril Picard

Engineering accreditation bodies express a strong consensus that in addition to technical and scientific skills, engineering education also needs to promote the development of professional skills. In general, team-based projects are considered to be valuab ...

2022