A gap persists between most engineering undergraduate curricula and employers' demands for diverse professional non-technical skills like teamwork, empathy, and critical thinking. These skills are vital for graduates' employability, play a key role in multidisciplinary team success, and are essential for effective workplace integration. Consequently, the work reported in this paper is part of a broader research aiming at developing a framework for promoting a wide range of students' professional skills during undergraduate engineering courses. This paper examines two case studies of undergraduate engineering courses that integrated a new framework aimed at enhancing students' awareness of their developing skills. Students worked in teams on projects and engaged in activities designed to apply and build skills relevant to the course. Each activity was followed by a reflective questionnaire where students assessed their skill levels. Additionally, a comprehensive skills questionnaire was completed at the beginning and end of the course, covering four skill categories essential for employability: mindset, thinking, emotional intelligence, and professional development. The findings indicate that this framework promoted students' selfawareness, including understanding specific skills and their terminology, recognizing strengths and areas for growth, and applying skills in varied contexts. Notably, engineering students showed a clear awareness of their limited ability to identify their own emotions. This research underscores the value of explicit skills development in engineering education, empowering students to engage in their professional growth and better preparing them for the demands of engineering careers.

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly integral for enhancing industrial operations and educational training across various sectors, including manufacturing, engineering education, and digital twin systems [1] . As such, stakeholders such as system developers, educators, industrial operators, and students necessitate varying levels of interaction and visualization capabilities for production line systems to enhance their understanding, trust, and operational effectiveness. The growing reliance on AR as a bridge between physical and digital environments in these critical areas underscores the need for AR systems to be accessible, comprehensible to their users, ensuring their use is safe, educational, and operationally effective [2] .

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly integral for guiding users through complex assembly tasks across various domains, including manufacturing, education, and hobbyist activities [1] . As AR systems become more sophisticated and autonomous in their guidance decisions, stakeholders such as end-users (students and hobbyists), educators, and system developers necessitate varying levels of explanations for the decisions proposed by these AR systems to enhance their trust and reliability. The growing reliance on AR as an assembly-support tool in educational and manufacturing contexts underscores the need for AR systems to be explainable in their guidance processes, comprehensible to their users, ensuring their use is safe, effective, and pedagogically sound.

Abstract Requirements engineering (RE) faces challenges due to the required collaboration and knowledge transfer among analysts, developers, and customers. Motivation theories have occasionally been used to analyze and encourage stakeholder motivation and engagement in RE tasks. Specifically, gamification mechanisms have been applied to software engineering tasks, in particular RE tasks, to promote stakeholder engagement. However, existing research lacks a rigorous method for designing gamified environments for RE tasks. This paper describes the development of a novel ESDR (Elicitation, Specification, Design, and Revision) method that leverages task types, task paradigms, gamification mechanisms, and motivation theories. The model was used as the basis for two case studies, yielding interesting results on student motivation and perceptions towards gamification. For the second case study, a socio-technical environment was developed to allow for gamified requirements elicitation and specification. This environment enables researchers and team managers to select different mechanisms to gamify the current RE task in practice. The environment was evaluated by students, providing anecdotal results. The key contributions are the proposed ESDR method integrating gamification and motivation theories into RE tasks, insights from two case studies applying this method, and the development of a gamified socio-technical environment for RE.

Code review is a highly important task in the software development lifecycle. However, some of the characteristics of code review hinder practitionersâ?? performance of this task. Code review is considered to be tedious and uninteresting, and includes challenging human aspects, such as collaboration among stakeholders. Despite the many concerns that need to be taken into consideration when performing code review, a comprehensive, formal definition thereof is yet to be determined. In a previous research, a set of formal guidelines for code review was presented, in the context of performing this task in a gamified environment. In this ongoing research, we explore whether the field of software engineering provides a formal definition for code review, and whether a formal definition is needed. The preliminary findings of this research indicate that while the field does provide several definitions for code review, in all that concerns the human aspect of this task, a formal definition is in order. As a response for this need, we present a framework of the task of code review toward its formalization, embedding gamification for motivation enhancement.