Teaching science through graphs is an essential strategy to enhance students' understanding of kinematics concepts, yet many learners struggle with interpreting graphs due to specific difficulties, including confusion between intervals, slopes and heights, and graphical representations. This study explores how modifications to visual elements in graphs-specifically color changes to axes and graphic areasaffect students' gaze behavior and engagement with key concepts. Using an eye-tracking device (Tobii Pro X2-60, 60 Hz), two conceptual problems from the widely used Test of Understanding of Graphics in Kinematics were presented to two balanced samples of 12 students each in both original and modified formats. The experimental design measured visit counts (VC) and total fixation duration (TFD) in four areas of interest (AOI): the problem, axes, graph, and response areas. Results indicate that modified visuals significantly increased visual attention on critical elements such as axes and graphic areas. For the slope-related exercise, modified graphics elicited higher visits and fixation times, suggesting that color changes influenced students' problem-solving strategies. Similarly, for the area-under-the-curve exercise, modified visuals directed students' attention more effectively to relevant graph elements. These findings underscore the importance of thoughtful visual design in guiding student focus and understanding, providing actionable insights for developing more effective educational materials and teaching strategies in STEAM education.

Empathy is an ability that should be put on practice by higher education students. The way of practicing empathy is a research field in which the best pedagogical tools are to be discovered. Empathy can be considered a competence or skill that should be considered in training students to focus on problem-solving. The Emotional Tool Design (ETD) implementation can help to create dynamics that improve the ability to empathize. This paper evaluates seven ETD designed to develop empathy in architecture, design, and engineering students. The tool's function is based on observing and identifying an emotion expressed by a character (emoji/emoticon). Seventy students participated in an online survey where they were asked to observe, identify, and understand the emotions expressed by seven tools based on PrEmo dynamics tool. This survey contained an empathy test (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), having three questions on the perception of the seven tools, and two comparative emotion identification questions at the end of the survey. The results of this study allows to conclude that the surveyed students possessed a low empathy component, but other competencies, such as fantasy and perspective-taking, enhanced the ETDs experience. For the students, emojis/emoticons were acceptable, particularly the non-anthropomorphic type. In addition, the student's profiles did not determine a differential in their way of empathizing; it was not significant for their empathy with the emotions displayed by the ETDs. Finally, the emoji/emoticon quality determines the empathy and emotional tools to work for the students. The ETDs have proven to be tools that can introduce students of any career to experience an empathy process.

The ideas generation becomes something fundamental, even outside, of design student education. The challenge presented in our research, following of this paper results, is to correctly implement an intuitive category method (progressive type) to generate solutions, unifying individual proposals or ideas through virtual platform and real-time communication with software or applications. The objective of this first paper is to identify the implementation impact from the perspective of first-use perception, and experience segmented by study area and gender. Our research begins with the design of an idea generation method, from design professionals experience, various tools are integrated and run-in digital platforms. This method was called ICRI from the acronym in Spanish “Ideacion, Categorizacion, Reagrupamiento, Ideación”. Subsequently, this method is applied in two university courses, one with students of design, art, urbanism, and the other course with students of chemical engineering. The application of the method was conducting through the MIRO platform and the communication by ZOOM for remote work. The method consists of two main stages, the initial stage is 4 steps where the students define, investigate, and establish findings, including team formation, to move on to a second stage. This second stage is composed by 4 steps where students generate ideas, review, define and group them, finally the final stage is composed by 5 steps to able to bring to a point of re-grouping, discussion, fusion and writing of new ideas. This method was applied to start a product design process or design strategy. The results revealed a high level of acceptance of the method, highlighting its practicality, rapidity, and functionality to generate ideas, as well as an active participation of the students in an equitable way. Also, the acceptance and perception of equity and equality of generation of ideas between gender was found, in addition to spotlight that no academic profile had a negative influence. The creation of the ICRI method is the consequence of the changes that have been created as a result of the need for virtuality for higher education.

Design education and practice are continuously evolving. Educational institutions must include intellectual complexities and new curriculum to support good design education. The design education future emerges multidisciplinary knowledge, teaching innovation and employment necessities. This paper describes a methodology centered in product validation with industrial design students. Focusing on discovering the student experience during the project execution, in addition to observing closely the female design student's perception on the methodology and process developed. The academic project was the design of a novel tool board. The students developed the proposed project in a period of eight weeks. Sixteen students participated as a sample of this research. The methodology consisted of eight phases that spanned from project brief to project conclusion, introducing two phases focused on validation exercises for the elements created to reach the solution of the tool board. During the end of the two evaluation phases, two surveys were applied asking for information on his previous experience during his design education and three elements that assessment the design methodology implementation: utility, novelty, and relevance. Using multiple choice and Likert scale answers the students answered the surveys. The survey's findings revealed relevant information on the project implementation focused on evaluation phases during the product design. The results revealed how students reflected on their previous experience developing projects, and how the design tool board integrate important phases like validation. Also, the students evaluated with a positive value the utility, novelty, and relevance of the developed project. However, the most important finding was the female perception comparing male students. The female assessment of novelty and relevance increased during project implementation, highlighting novelty as a perceived element to a greater range than men. This research results allowed us to discover more information about female students experience with creative and validation processes.

The practice of design is constantly evolving; new technologies have become a support for the implementation of disruptive proposals in diverse disciplines, including design products. A Paradigm shift are present in the design and engineering education related with support technologies and developing new products. The objective of this work is to present the novel process of a design project that incorporates a creative and objective process for designing and validating products in order to attract, engage and retain talent in design and engineering courses for research and technology implementation. The challenge was a project for create an novelty industrial tool board with a minimum number of tools validated by Eye-tracking (ET) technology. The ET technology is based on the study of eye movement, which provides an objective indicator of where a person's overt, and typically centered, attention is focused. Twenty-eight students from the third year of Industrial Design Bachelor’s program were involved in this academic course and used a product design methodology to implement the technology and dynamics of the ET. The results of this education project revealed a novel dynamic in design education. The results reveled an improved interest in research and technology implementation. Students perceived the relevance of ET technology in a fundamental phase of product design. In addition, the students shared their enjoyment and interest in reusing this technology in similar processes. The students' perception of factors, such as utility, novelty and relevance of this technology, in their design processes was positive. Finally, the novel process became familiar to the students, even if it was their first-time using ET technology. This work reveals how technology becomes a fundamental part of the process and how to guide students to integrate rigid and meticulous processes in design products without neglecting the creative process.

Distance education is an important tool in current education; this paper focuses on the validation of the experience and the assessment by students for a teaching methodology in a real-time distance format. The methodology covers a series of elements such as the introduction of a single teacher type, a transformed teaching space and relevant aspects of distance courses. The results reveal how the flexibility and usefulness of the course format are relevant elements for the students' experience. The general conclusions of this study describe how a real-time distance course can be an area of opportunity for educational innovation in university courses.

In this paper, a teaching model that makes use of a YouTube video repository for Engineering courses is presented. Some results show the preference of students of such a model over traditional teaching models that use live video. The proposed offline model with a video repository is presented as a better alternative for Engineering courses, improving aspects as students satisfaction and above all, the performance of students in Structural Mechanics courses where the model was implemented.

Digital video decoding, enabled by the MPEG-2 video standard, is an important future application for embedded systems, particularly personal digital assistants and other information appliances. Many such systems require portability and wireless communication capabilities, and thus face severe limitations in size and power consumption. This places a premium on integration and efficiency, and favors software solutions for video functionality over specialized hardware. Apart from computation, an equally important problem in video decoding is the data bandwidth and the need to insure adequate data supply. MPEG data sets are very large, and generate significant amounts of excess memory traffic for standard data caches, up to 100 times the amount required for decoding. Yet MPEG data has locality which caches can exploit if properly optimized, providing fast, flexible, and automatic data supply. We propose a set of enhancements which target the specific needs of the heterogeneous types within the MPEG decoder working set. These optimizations significantly improve the efficiency of small caches, reducing cache-memory traffic by almost 70%, and can make an enhanced 4-kB cache perform better than a standard 1 MB cache. This performance improvement can enable high-resolution, full frame rate video playback in cheaper, smaller systems than would otherwise be possible.

Multimedia computer architectures can speed-up applications significantly when programmed manually. Optimized programs have been non-portable up to now, because of differences in instruction sets, register lengths, alignment requirements and programming styles. We solve all these problems by using a library of C pre-processor macros called MMM. We implemented three examples from video compression in MMM, and automatically translated them into optimized code for four distinct multimedia processors. Their performance is comparable, and in several cases better, than equivalent examples optimized by the processor vendors.