ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Pedagogy Through InnovationView all 7 articles
Tuning experiential activities' constraints influences student engagement and focus on specific transversal skills
Provisionally accepted
Siara Isaac1*
Joelyn De Lima1
Yousef Jalali2
Valentina Rossi1
Samuel Schmid3Stefan Gabriel Popescu1
Daniel Tozadore4
Jessica Dehler Zufferey1- 1Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
- 2Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
- 3Universite de Geneve, Geneva, Switzerland
- 4University College London, London, United Kingdom
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Experiential learning is well-suited for developing transversal skills, however poor understanding of pedagogical conditions for skill development reduces contributions in engineering programs. This paper describes how adjusting the constraints of collaborative design tasks can increase engagement and refine students' personal development goals. 85 engineering students participated in activities based on the 3T PLAY framework emphasising specific skills. Students evaluated their designs, reported their emotional state, self-assessed their transversal skills, and reported the skills they wanted to develop. Our analysis showed the specific constraints of each experiential activity influenced the skills prioritised by students, while increasing the specificity of the skills students cited. Students' evaluation of their design and emotional states show high engagement and potential for eliciting pedagogically relevant emotions to enhance sustainability concerns. Our findings are relevant at the scale of semester projects, indicating that teachers should adjust the characteristics of design projects to support students' transversal skill development.
Keywords: Engineering Education, Experiential learning, instructional design, professional skills, project-based learning, Student perceptions, Transversal skills
Received: 19 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Isaac, De Lima, Jalali, Rossi, Schmid, Popescu, Tozadore and Dehler Zufferey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Siara Isaac
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