The use of Artificial Intelligence models to facilitate some professional activities or daily living actions, has been an increasing tendency for the last years. Although, since the very beginning, some doubts arose about how these new technologies can impact in the common people lives, the lack of a simple and usable interface that would allow a massive access to these services and models made these worries non relevant.

But, for students and professors in universities, a critical change has been growing for the last decade. As college students have a relatively deep knowledge on digital technologies, they are very aware of the possibilities that offer the new Internet services. Among students have arisen a sentiment that everything they can find “through the Internet” is worthless. As a consequence, current college students have a very low motivation for theoretical or abstract knowledge. An increasing absenteeism is the main symptom, as well as a total lack of interest for all those competences that are not directly related to technologies and ability with a clear a direct application in companies and the labor market.

For those subjects working competencies from the high levels in the Bloom taxonomy, it was simpler to mitigate this problem as they have a practical approach and vision by default. Methodologies such as “Project-based learning” or “Challenge-based learning” are now very common and have reported good results. Sadly, because how knowledge is built and the structure of the degrees, these courses tend to be scheduled in the last courses. And in those courses, students’ motivation is typically higher as well.

On the contrary, subjects in the initial courses are more abstract, deal with basic content and face a more complex situation. Competences from the low levels in the Bloom taxonomy must be worked, and professors must compete against the new digital tools such as chatbots, which can facilitate the students some answers and evaluation products in a pretty simple way. The traditional answer was to implement some strategies to promote the students’ participation and engagement, such as gamification or flipped classroom. Results are positive, but some evidence show their performance is decreasing as the “innovation effect” disappears.

In order to address this situation a pilot experience was planned and carried out at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. As a proposal, during year 2023/24 a league was organized. Students could participate in groups (between four and six people). The league was composed of a sequence of battle, where students must compete against chatbots and other similar tools. Students must develop a product, usually a software, following a creative process. In this pilot experience, students from cybersecurity courses were selected as participants. Durind the battle, students could use chatbots to get some initial designs. Later, students should analyze the responses from the intelligent models and propose some improvements. Finally, they need to prove the proposed solution improves the one from the chatbots in any dimension. Students get points according to the results from every battle. At the end of the year, students with the higher score get the final prize.

Results confirmed a significant decreasing in the absenteeism rate and a relevant improvement in the students’ motivation, according to the official surveys.

Keywords: Engineering education, pilot experiences, challenge-based learning, cybersecurity, learning by doing, creativity.