Social skills and moral values in engineering education

Abstract

All technical degrees in the Spanish Higher Educational System include a mandatory Final or Honours project. This is a technical activity which should lead the student to put into practice most of the skills acquired throughout the whole degree. Only technical skills are usually put into practice, although recent studies have proved that further capabilities, such as those included in the category of “social skills”, will also be demanded by employers. Moreover, the introduction of the European Higher Educational System, strongly emphasizes the importance of this sort of capabilities. What we present in this work is a way to include both social skills and moral values in the Honours Project without any loss of its technical character. To do so we have launched a line of projects devoted to the development of technical aids to improve the welfare of disabled people. Collaboration agreements with nonprofit institutions and charities give us access to the needs of these communities and the opportunity to apply the results of the projects. A procedure to manage projects of this kind is also presented.