This study explores the implementation of the Dean's List initiative, a student-centered approach at a large School of Engineering and Sciences serving approximately 8,000 undergraduates. In this program, 37 students collaborated on nine strategic projects under the guidance of 17 academic directors acting as coaches, aiming to enhance the student success mentoring model. By emphasizing leadership, teamwork, and communication, the initiative fostered a supportive academic environment where students engaged in solving real-world challenges to improve their academic experience. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected through surveys, interviews, and project assessments. The key projects included a peer mentorship program for first-year students, enhanced feedback systems for course evaluations, improved communication between students and leadership and strengthened cocurricular engagement. Preliminary findings indicate a positive impact on mentoring quality and skill development, particularly in leadership and teamwork. The initiative also promoted collaboration among students and faculty, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement. This research underscores the role of student-led initiatives in refining mentoring frameworks and highlights the Dean's List as a model for integrating student voices into institutional practices. Compared to traditional mentoring models, this approach offers a comprehensive focus on mentorship, engagement, and skill development, preparing students for both academic and career success.

In today's rapidly evolving job market, academic institutions implement diverse strategies to enhance students' professional competencies and employability. These strategies include active industry and educational partner involvement in curriculum development, the promotion of soft skills, the integration of real-world experiences, and the implementation of internship programs. At Tecnológico de Monterrey, the Tec21 educational model is structured around four core pillars: challenge-based learning, academic flexibility, inspiring faculty, and comprehensive student support. This study examines the impact of industry collaboration and mentorship on student development in two specific programs: Mechatronics Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Throughout their academic journey, students engage with over ten companies, applying theoretical knowledge to solve real-world challenges. These experiences not only strengthen technical competencies but also foster essential soft skills such as teamwork, problem-solving, adaptability, and leadership. Industry collaboration is a fundamental component of Tec21, ensuring students are consistently exposed to industry-driven challenges and gaining hands-on experience through internships and project-based learning. This research explores the impact of two key componentsindustry collaboration and comprehensive mentorship-on the development of future-oriented competencies. The study assesses their contribution to the holistic growth of three cohorts (620 students), preparing them to tackle both current and emerging engineering challenges. The findings indicate that students engaged in industry projects demonstrate greater readiness to address complex, real-world problems, exhibiting enhanced adaptability and problem-solving skills. Furthermore, the mentorship model significantly improves student engagement and motivation, fostering increased confidence and competence in both academic and professional settings.

Engineering students in higher education need to be prepared to work on sustainable solutions to the complex problems that they will be confronted during their professional careers. The first cohort of graduates from the Tec21 educational model, launched in 2019, completed their studies after four years. Preliminary findings suggest the successful implementation of the model, which is attributed to the diverse experiences encountered by graduates through approximately 7-8 training partners throughout their academic journey. This article presents a comparative analysis of the level of achievement of our engineering students in 4 soft skills evaluated during the first stage of their professional careers. Our examination focuses on 498 students from August 2019 enrollment out of over 1,600 students across five academic programs: Industrial and Systems Engineering, Computer Technologies Engineering, Mechatronics Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Biotechnology Engineering at the Monterrey Campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey. Preliminary results show high levels of achievement in several soft competencies such as self-awareness, well-being, and self-regulation, while self-awareness scores lower, suggesting the need to promote constant self-reflection in our engineering students. Tec21 educational model at Tecnológico de Monterrey is demonstrated as an empowering factor for students to acquire specialized knowledge and essential soft skills. Tec21 distinguishes itself from traditional programs that are formulated around integral courses, with its holistic approach to learning throughout the undergraduate journey. Finally, Tec21 promotes student interaction with professors and the educational environment as a complete learning experience.

Digital education has reached enormous advances and acceptance in the last decade. COVID 19 has triggered a boom in the digital education implementation. Those courses that never had been delivered in a digital format, suddenly were forced to be prepared and presented as digital education. The nature of different courses might facilitate this new reality, depending if they are theoretical, numerical or mixed. This paper has evaluated a set of characteristics deployed in different engineering courses transformed into digital courses, depending on its nature. On the other hand, this analysis had a focus on the women participation in engineering courses and their evaluations of such digital course’s characteristics. The main purpose of the present paper is to answer the question of what characteristics within the course methodology design, works and are evaluated better by students. A survey was designed and applied to the 87% of the Industrial and Systems Engineering program population in Tecnologico de Monterrey, Sonora Mexico. Data was statistically analyzed to find if there were any difference between female and male opinions about the course characteristics and within each gender in each kind of course. Also, a correlation analysis was made to identify how the elements influenced each other and if they should be combined depending on the desired result. An additional analysis took place to identify the level of participation of female and male students before and during pandemic time. Findings reveal interesting coincidences and differences in evaluating some of those digital course’s characteristics depending on the gender of students and course nature, such as women participation and the differences in perception of competitiveness among women and men. Some of these findings are: 1) In mixed subjects, male students identify a higher academic environment that encourages more competitiveness than female students. 2) Another finding is that men seem to have greater motivation to attend class sessions in numerical subjects. 3) Among female students a negative correlation between the frequency of the instructor request of a final reflection analysis of the session with considering a competitiveness academic environment. 4) Talking about mixed courses, all female students evaluated with the highest score in the question about motivation to be present in the session and the identification of moments and activities that allowed them to share opinions. To reinforce women participation in Industrial and Systems Engineering digital courses, those identified characteristics shall be included and developed in the course methodology design.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced Higher Education classes to shift to online education. This sudden change required universities to respond rapidly, adapting their classes to remote courses maintaining quality educational delivery. In this context, our university implemented the Digital Flexible Model (DFM) to continue with its academic offer. The challenge involved moving 55,000 classes per week to the DFM, attending 90,000 students with 9,400 professors, all in one week. At the end of the semester, a strategic survey was applied to a statistical sample of professors and students from the Engineering School to get feedback about their experience with the DFM. The results highlight takeaways to improve the instructional model and offer interesting reflections by gender from the experience of faculty and students.

This work presents the descriptive analysis of the results of the students' woman-faculty evaluation close question survey results for the Tec21 Competence-Based Educational Model. The analysis includes, and discusses, box graphs of the results of the 2019 fall term and 2020 spring term by region and campus in our University. The analysis also includes the distribution of the woman-faculty evaluation in the same two terms. This study includes 6,442 students evaluating more than 700 full-time and part-time faculty members lecturing more than 400 courses from the School of Engineering and Science, in more than 26 campuses in Mexico at Tecnologico de Monterrey. The results of this descriptive analysis show that women are around 46% of the faculty; woman faculty highly improve performance students' survey results from one term to the next; more than 50% of the women faculty are evaluated above 9; the median of students' survey results shows that women faculty median is only two decimals below men faculty; women faculty perform better in Blocks a kind of project course delivered by at least 3 professors and where collaboration is crucial. This analysis shows that women faculty adapted pretty well their teaching style to the Tec21 competency-based education model.

We present a new approach to sensor-based navigation in cluttered environments. In our system, tasks are specified in terms of visual goals, and obstacles are detected by a laser range finder. To effect task performance, we introduce a new gain scheduling visual servo controller. Our approach uses a diagonal gain matrix whose entries are adjusted during execution according to one of several proposed gain schedules. Obstacle avoidance is achieved by allowing the detected obstacles to generate artificial repulsive potential fields, which alter the motion of the mobile robot base. Since this motion affects the vision-based control, it is compensated by corresponding camera motions. Finally, we combine the obstacle avoiding and visual servo components of the system so that visual servo tasks can be performed as obstacles are avoided. We illustrate our approach with both simulations and real experiments using our experimental platform H/sup il/are2Bis.

Many approaches to visual servoing and mobile robot navigation are based on tracking feature points or landmarks in images, but not all features points are equally effective as landmarks. Here we develop methods for selecting within an image those landmarks which are both perceptually salient and visually distinctive, and consequently are readily recognized in a second image acquired from a different viewpoint. Empirically, we characterize the performance of the recognition method and then demonstrate that the selection process does in fact choose the landmarks which are more likely to be recognized.

Presents the motion control for our mobile robot Hilare2Bis using both visual servoing and potential fields in a, cluttered indoor environment. This function is required in order to execute navigation tasks in a robust way. The camera is mounted on the robot close to the end effector of an arm with 6 DOF, used as a virtual pan and tilt platform: only two DOFs are controlled (/spl theta//sub pan/, /spl theta//sub tilt/) by the visual servoing process. The mobile platform is controlled according to the position of some features in an image, and to the distance to the obstacles detected by a 2D laser range finder.

Presents a controller for driving a mobile robot towards a target in a cluttered environment. The proposed method combines visual servoing techniques allowing the target to be tracked, with an obstacle avoidance strategy based on the information provided by a 2D laser range sensor. Simulation results are presented at the end of the paper.