Teaching Transversal Skills for Engineering Students

How can we better prepare engineering students to work together on dynamic, complex problems? Transversal skills are essential to maximising the potential of technical expertise, particularly when working across disciplines, cultures, and contexts.

This book 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
• 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
• A backward design structure to create new activities to teach transversal skills

To learn more about how this book is useful for you, visit the Reviews tab to read feedback from educators in 6 different countries.

These resources were created as part of the 3T PLAY project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), supported by funding from the LEGO Foundation.

Reviews

“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.”
Prof. 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 Lundström, 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 Zürich, Switzerland

“Transversal skills are fundamental when educating engineers capable of facing the grand challenges of the future. This book provides both a practical framework and examples of activities that educators can implement in their classrooms to reach these ambitious goals.”
Dr. Tamara Milosevic, Head of the Transversal skills and career center, EPFL, 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.”
Prof. Diana Bairaktarova, Virginia Tech, USA

“The activity outlines and materials are very clear. I was easily able to facilitate 2 workshops only using the rich resources provided.”
Dr. Rosalie Chevalley, Metronomy, Canada

“This book provides practical support for responding to the well-documented need for better transversal skills development in engineering education. Combining evidence-informed and innovative approaches, the resulting strategies create engaging yet challenging situations for students to develop their skills.”
Prof. Kathryn Hess, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Outreach, EPFL, Switzerland

“My takeaway is the Trident framework for developing skills, with knowledge, experiencing, and transfer to practice. I’ll be applying it when developing courses in the future.”
Calum Dunderdale, Managing Partner, SMP Academy, Hungary