The offer of attractive degrees for future students is one of the main objectives of any higher education institution. Including, in the fastest possible way, topics or techniques with great social demand (such as artificial intelligence or drones) facilitates the increasing of the number of students with a very limited promotion effort. In the most extreme case, Universities may create new degrees, focused on these new technologies, to go deeper in their fundamentals and applications. However, although demand is very high in those cases, there is also a clear discomfort and discontent among students. Even higher than the level observed in other degrees. An informal study during the academic year 2023-24, at the Computer Engineering school, and the absenteeism data from Geomatics School, acknowledge these observations.

Short research among students in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence degree (one of the degrees affected by this problem) between October and November 2023, showed the origin of this problem is not the teaching, the subjects or the performance of the professors, but the previous and priori expectations of the students.
Just for mentioning one of the most criticized aspects by students, in every Spanish engineering degree it is mandatory to include 60ECTS (around one academic year) focused on scientific fundamentals and basic competences (usually physics, logic, mathematics, …). This requirement cannot be avoided, and it is well explained by Higher Education institutions in all promotion materials… but most students are not aware of this scheme until they enroll the University.

These frustrated expectations generate discontent among students, whose consequences are varied: while in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence degree the performance is good (even excellent) and only surveys show the low motivation among students; in the Geospatial Technologies degree this discontent causes an abandon rate above 35% after the first academic year (moving from 70 students in the first course, to only 45 in the second course). Even in institutions whose private nature establishes more limitations to the students (such as Alfonso X el Sabio University), this situation is also common in degrees such as Artificial Intelligence and Computation (although in this case there is no precise public data).

In order to address this situation, a pilot experience was planned and carried out at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. As a proposal, during the academic year 2024/25 a pilot experience affecting eleven subjects in ten different degrees was organized. The final objective is to make visible how fundamentals are essential to build the technologies students are interested in, so that their expectations are managed in a good way, and they do not get frustrated. Teaching was organized through questions, challenges and problems, iterative, and incremental. So, students must discover the answer through engineering (the process is independent and creative). Students could also use prototypes. The entire experience was managed using the Design-Thinking methodology. Students could participate in groups (between four and six people). Classes were open spaces with materials such as MS Teams or Miro to facilitate cooperation among students.

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

Keywords: Engineering education, pilot experiences, incremental learning, cooperative learning, learning by doing, creativity.