Abstract
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.
