Abstract:

Following the implementation of the GAME Project for educational innovation at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, because of the data obtained in the study in this regard, a proposal for soft skills was formulated from the perception of students from a sample selected from different Technical Schools of Engineering. This proposal has been called the "alphabet of social and personal competencies of the future engineer at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid". The next step was to be the empirical verification of this proposal by means of a concrete measurement of the impact of these soft skills among students who carry out gamification activities or serious games.

These twenty-six skills detected and identified have been subjected to an assessment of a sample of students to determine, whether or not, they are known, and to what extent they are noticed among the personal or psychological traits of the respondents. The results of this research have been dealt with in this article for dissemination to the scientific community. In this way, we wish to highlight the value of the findings detected and the possible extrapolation to other university centers or institutions dedicated to university training in engineering careers. This is a highly original work since there are no studies with such a close approach to students and their perception of the reception of social and personal skills during their engineering training.

The opinions contributed by the students have been of interest. And as they are students who have experienced gamification activities or serious games during their training, in any sphere, either because they have been actioned during the subjects to help the learning of the subject, or because they are the program's design of these gamification's or serious games. In this way, we have been able to cover a wide range of perceptions that can place this work among those of high impact for future research on this subject.

It is clear that today, university education in technical careers goes beyond the mere transmission of cognitive content to deal with social and personal skills that are of great value for future professionals. And this is not only because the professional environment is increasingly demanding and requires better trained engineers or those with the most complete training possible, but also because today's students interact in a hyper-connected society, with massive sources of information, are connected and networked, have extensive repositories of technical knowledge and materials that they do not need to hear from a teacher, and can improve other more technical skills. However, this same student, a future engineer, when asked in empirical studies prior to this one about his or her last or not at all developed competences, has always referred to social, personal or psychological ones.

This is where our work places the emphasis precisely on measuring what kind of perception students have of their resilience, self-discipline, ability to work in uncertain environments, leadership, communication, entrepreneurial spirit or financial understanding, among other soft skills that we propose as a battery of possible competences to be developed during the training of the future engineer.

Keywords:

Soft skills, gamification, serious games, educational innovation, measurement methods.