Promoting Students' Soft Skills in a Telecommunication Engineering Course with an Elevator Pitch Activity

An elevator pitch is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a process, product, service, organization, or event and its value proposition. The name comes from the idea that it should be possible to deliver the sum-mary within the time span of an elevator ride, so anywhere between 30 sec-onds and 2 minutes, which means the key points need to get across quickly. In this particular educational context, technical students have been encour-aged to defend, under the typical rules of the elevator pitch, the knowledge acquired during the semester in a specific subject. This contribution focuses on the classroom experience and how the transversality of the activity can help students to strive and think in a different way than they are used to in the classroom of a technical career.

Improving speaking skill for technical students at IUH through experiential activities

Nowadays, English is one of the most important languages in Vietnam, so students at all levels in Vietnam have been studying English as a compulsory subject with special attention to speaking skills to communicate and work in the integration world. However, speaking skill is still strongly not successful with students, especially technical students at universities. Therefore, this small-scale research aims to investigate the difficulties which technical students at IUH usually faced when practicing the skill, and the efficiency of experiential activities in improving learners' speaking skills. This research used quasi-experimental method. The sample of the research is 120 technical students in 4 English classes in the second semester of the school year. After distributing a questionnaire to 120 technical students at IUH, the findings indicated that speaking skill is essentially evaluated by most of the students, although they still have some difficulties when practicing. It was also evident that students were interested in experiential activities which were applied to improve students' skills, such as watching films and telling opinions, role play, communicate in group work, and so on. These activities not only enhance students' positive motivation in studying English and speaking skills but also improve their communicative skills.

Extent at Which Vocational Guidance Influence Career Decision of Vocational and Technical Students

Personal guidance centers on problems of personality, physical and emotional development, interpersonal relations and similar matters. But vocational guidance given to students may or may not influence their career after graduation. This study thus examined extent at which vocational guidance influence career decision of vocational and technical students. This is a descriptive research design of the survey type. 220 technical students were sampled all technical education students in Ilorin metropolis. Frequency count and mean were used answer the research questions and Hypothesis was tested with t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The findings established that vocational guidance has been able to influence career decision making of vocational and technical education students to a high extent. Also, there was no significant difference in the impact of vocational guidance on career choice of junior and senior vocational and technical education students. It was therefore recommended that Vocational and Technology Education students should be exposed to the importance of guidance services and what counseling is all about in order for them to make good career decisions.

The Analysis of Two Components English Statements with the Translated Morpheme КАРТ-

Nowadays the technical students’ interest in linguistic studies during English language classes in general and concerning land management in particular is being actualized in the context of defining metacommunicative markers as utterance boundaries for the formation of a terminological compound nest.The purpose of this article is to describe the practical experience of analyzing the features of two-component phrases with translated morpheme “карт-“ (hereinafter – DSMK) being based on the analysis of foreign scientific sources on land management according to the defined algorithm. The results of the study are presented in seven conclusions. The first conclusion is the expediency of students' analysis of phrases on land management according to the defined algorithm: to review the sources for the presence of the most common morphemes with high derivation potential and to be convinced of the expediency of studying a certain selected morpheme, to write down existing Ukrainian phrases with the required morpheme, assigning a specific number, spread terminological foreign phrases by blocks by structural features, to analyze according to other related characteristics for further generalization-collection of information from each block (according to the reliability of translation, the presence of proper names and numerical values, in relation to the land management industry, by the correspondence of the number of components of the Ukrainian and English variants and by the frequency of use in the educational texts and own statements of future land managers). The second conclusion is the expediency of taking into consideration the phrases with the translated morpheme “карт-“, as 108 varieties of stable English clichés were found. The third conclusion is the assignment of two-component attributive-nominative English phrases without additional conjunctions or prepositions to those that have an extremely high derivational potential to attract the translated card morpheme - in 99 varieties with a parallel assignment of two-component clichés with an additional preposition of or in / on connectors to those that have low derivation potential in only 9 varieties. The fourth conclusion is the assertion that the majority of DSMK with a significant quantitative advantage deals with the narrow specialization in cartography in contrast to the indirect being used in general thematic texts. The fifth conclusion is that the DSMK is more prone to the expected translation (74:34 ratio), although more than a third of these clichés should be guided by official translation options. The sixth conclusion is to determine the very low relevance of DSMK to proper names and numerical values and to a slightly higher percentage of DSMK with different number of components in the Ukrainian and English versions of the translation. The seventh conclusion is the fixation of the presence of DSMK in the educational texts and own statements of future land managers in the ratio 27:81, which proves the sufficient frequency of use of the translated morpheme “ карт-“ in regular phrases in the professional speech of future land managers, but not decisive. The prospect of further research is to describe the experience of the analysis of multicomponent constant clichés with a translated morpheme “карт-“ according to the proposed abovenamed algorithm.

Design And Development of a Narrative Based Tabletop Game for Promoting Soft Skills Acuisition in Technical Students in The South African

A serious tabletop game called “Gr8 Success!” has been developed for an undergraduate Communication skills module at the North-West University (NWU) in South Africa. This paper presents the details of the development process and discusses the first play tested prototype of the serious game in question. The game is described in the context of a conceptual framework being developed by researchers at the Serious Game Institute of South Africa (SGI-SA).

Learning behavior of technical students – Awareness as key competence

Learning has become more important than ever before, as we are moving towards a digital, fast-changing society. Formal university training has changed, too, from pure “lectures” to more modern formats, including e-learning, interactive and collaborative settings. Students also find plenty of information online, and the new skill in demand is finding relevant knowledge instead of having memorized knowledge. Knowledge doubles fast and becomes outdated even faster. Being aware of one’s learning behaviors was found to be a core competence of university students eager to educate themselves. This work sets a self-assessment amongst bachelor and master students of a technical programme – International Business and Engineering – into perspective with literature findings. The authors conclude that knowing ones strengths in learning is a prerequisite of acquiring additional knowledge effectively and efficiency. Students have become more demanding towards the presentation of learning opportunities. However, it is them who have to take initiative to make most out of their learning journeys. As students progress through their studies, their awareness of collaborative and interactive learning seems to decrease, which reminds one of Socrates: “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.” One can speculate that his finding is due to more critical reflection by master students, or that by the time the students have entered the master’s programme, the novel learning approaches have been familiarized/assimilated and do not receive further attention, which is a hint that the art of collaborative interactive learning has been mastered.

TECHNOLOGY MAJORS’ METHODOLOGY EDUCATION: COMPARING APPROACHES FROM TWO COURSES

The National Defense University (NDU) trains officers to develop their academic and professional skills. To accomplish this, the university offers two mandatory courses on methodological training for military technology students for master level education. The first course was theoretically oriented, and the second course was practically oriented. These both master-level methodology courses emphasize practice oriented mathematical skills, which officers use in their operative decision-making and statistical analysis. This study focuses on student-centered learning methodologies linked to teachers’ observations from current and previous course implementations. Results in this study described the outcome from the first run of the revised curriculum. We collected data from students’ course reports and the university’s standard student evaluation of teaching (SET). According to the SET, the course 2 which was practically oriented course, where groups worked on more significant projects gained higher value among students. In conclusion, we recommend that teachers continue using student-centered learning methodologies to technical students as much as possible. Theoretically underscored courses should also contain more practical examples. Keywords: distance education, flipped learning, learning by doing, research methodology, student-centered learning

Forming Competency in Health Promotion in Technical Specialists Using Physical Education

In the light of new information, environmental, educational and production conditions, the problem of creating a health-promoting environment in a technical university appears to be rather important and needs to be studied in detail. The research aims to develop, justify and experimentally verify pedagogical conditions for forming competency in health promotion in technical students using physical education. The experiment involved two groups of students (Years 1-4): 241 individuals in the experimental group (EG) and 237 individuals in the control group (CG). Research methods include pedagogical observations, surveys, tests, self-evaluation, expert evaluation of students? practical skills, analysis of personal valeological and sport diaries of students; modelling in the framework of ascertaining and formative stages of the experiment; quantitative analysis of empirical data and its quality presentation; statistical verification of the proposed pedagogical conditions and the research hypothesis, the use of relevant tests (the Ruffier-Dickson index, the Cooper test) and quantitative indicators (Student?s t-test) in order to obtain some objective data on the results from the implementation of the author?s model. At the end of the experiment, most respondents (80 %) in the EG have reached a high level of competency in health promotion using physical education. In the CG, the differences in levels have not shown any significant changes since only 32.5% of respondents have a high level. Therefore, the results of the pedagogical experiment show some positive dynamics and confirm the effectiveness of the designed model and technology for forming competency in health promotion in technical students using physical education, which has made it possible to create qualitatively new conditions of the educational process and enhance students? motivation towards developing and realizing values in this field.