Education in electric and electronic engineering via students involvement in innovative projects

The promotion of the students´ transversal or generic competencies is one of the key points of the new European educational framework. Today, companies hiring graduate students are not only concerned about their technical background but also transversal skills and competencies. Hence, it becomes necessary to adopt measures to promote and cultivate these competencies among students. The students´ involvement in innovative research projects brings an excellent opportunity to achieve this goal: competence dimensions as team work, effective oral and written communication, effective use of informational resources, independent learning, foreign language, problem resolution among many other can be effectively developed by involving students in multidisciplinary teams conceived to develop this type of projects. This paper focuses on this idea, remarking the usefulness of these projects to achieve the goals pursues by the new educational framework in the context of generic competencies. A real success story at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, based on a project relying on the development of an intelligent hardware system (SEE4ME) is presented. It confirms the ability of this approach to promote generic skills and competencies among students.