Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students
A Practical Playbook of Activities with Tangibles
Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes
Will be published approx. on 2. July 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
226 pages
978-2-88915-731-0 (ISBN)
Description
A guide for engineering instructors that offers engaging approaches to teaching transversal skills.
How can we better prepare engineering students to work together on dynamic, complex problems? Transversal skills are essential to maximizing the potential of technical expertise, particularly when working across disciplines, cultures, and contexts.
Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students provides a practical approach for developing students' transversal skills based on the 3T PLAY Trident framework and evidence-informed experiential learning approaches. Designed to enable higher education instructors to improve how transversal skills are taught, this book provides: graphical activity outlines with timing, mode, and materials; downloadable handouts and slides; a review of why transversal skills should be explicitly taught, which skills are under-addressed, and conditions that support students to develop skills; evidence-informed conceptual summaries and practice based tips; and a backward design structure to create new activities to teach transversal skills.
How can we better prepare engineering students to work together on dynamic, complex problems? Transversal skills are essential to maximizing the potential of technical expertise, particularly when working across disciplines, cultures, and contexts.
Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students provides a practical approach for developing students' transversal skills based on the 3T PLAY Trident framework and evidence-informed experiential learning approaches. Designed to enable higher education instructors to improve how transversal skills are taught, this book provides: graphical activity outlines with timing, mode, and materials; downloadable handouts and slides; a review of why transversal skills should be explicitly taught, which skills are under-addressed, and conditions that support students to develop skills; evidence-informed conceptual summaries and practice based tips; and a backward design structure to create new activities to teach transversal skills.
Reviews / Votes
"This book enabled me to infuse multiple dimensions of sustainability in engineering curriculum seamlessly. As an engineering education faculty, the structure of the activity guide (Chapter 4) allowed me to easily adapt it to my classroom context. It was a success from the first time and our students participated enthusiastically!" * Dr. Rucha Joshi, associate professor, Innovation Lab and Grand Challenges Studio, Plaksha University, India * "I implemented the Chapter 3 activity on emotional self-management in my 1000-student 'engineering practice and design' course. It was great to see how students engaged with the activity, moving slightly out of their comfort zones while developing a willingness to provide feedback in their project teams." * Brian Frank, Smith Engineering, Queen's University, Canada * "I already knew that I wanted to develop how I taught these skills in my course, but the 3T activity guides made it straightforward to structure and plan good learning activities that really focus on what I want for my students." * Dr. Oxana Lundstroem, postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Technology, Linnaeus University, Sweden * "Educating engineers and scientists is about more than developing their technical skills, they need skills to work together and in society. Our mission as educators, to prepare students for a real-life complexity, where transversal competences play one of the key roles. It is exactly on these points that the 3T PLAY program has been useful to me. We used to offer activities to train our teaching assistants, and those workshops got the best feedback within our training program. These absolutely unique resources save a lot of time for teachers and are a great inspiration!" * Dr. Vira Bondar, Head of the EPT-hub/ Educational Developer and Lecturer at the Department of Physics, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland * "Designing learning activities that develop intra and interpersonal skills can be challenging. So, I really appreciate the scaffolding provided by Chapter 8 for the design of new activities to develop emotional and human skills." * Diana Bairaktarova, Virginia Tech, USA *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Switzerland
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
50 figures
Dimensions
Height: 297 mm
Width: 210 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-2-88915-731-0 (9782889157310)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Siara Isaac is a project manager and researcher for the 3T PLAY project at the Centre for Learning Sciences. Joelyn de Lima is a science education researcher and a pedagogical advisor.
Content
"BOOK ABSTRACT
THE 3T PLAY PROJECT
3T PLAY FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING TRANSVERSAL SKILLS - Chapter 1: How to develop engineering students' transversal skills
3T PLAY ACTIVITY GUIDES FOR TEACHING TRANSVERSAL SKILLS - Chapter 2: How to support students to develop skills that improve collaboration, including retrospective discussions - Chapter 3 : How to support students' skills for giving each other constructive feedback, especially when it is difficult to hear - Chapter 4: How to support students to develop skills that promote sustainability - Chapter 5: How to support students to develop coaching and peer teaching skills - Chapter 6: How to support students to develop risk assessment and planning skills, especially for team projects - Chapter 7: How to support students to develop skills for cultivating psychological safety in their teams
DEVELOPING ACTIVITIES WITH THE 3T PLAY FRAMEWORK - Chapter 8: How teachers can use the 3T PLAY trident framework to design activities that develop transversal skills"
THE 3T PLAY PROJECT
3T PLAY FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING TRANSVERSAL SKILLS - Chapter 1: How to develop engineering students' transversal skills
3T PLAY ACTIVITY GUIDES FOR TEACHING TRANSVERSAL SKILLS - Chapter 2: How to support students to develop skills that improve collaboration, including retrospective discussions - Chapter 3 : How to support students' skills for giving each other constructive feedback, especially when it is difficult to hear - Chapter 4: How to support students to develop skills that promote sustainability - Chapter 5: How to support students to develop coaching and peer teaching skills - Chapter 6: How to support students to develop risk assessment and planning skills, especially for team projects - Chapter 7: How to support students to develop skills for cultivating psychological safety in their teams
DEVELOPING ACTIVITIES WITH THE 3T PLAY FRAMEWORK - Chapter 8: How teachers can use the 3T PLAY trident framework to design activities that develop transversal skills"