Incorporating climate change and sustainability into higher education is essential for developing future leaders with the attitudinal, conceptual, and procedural competencies needed to tackle climate challenges and work toward a sustainable future. However, traditional teaching methods often fail to fully engage students with the complexities and transdisciplinary nature of climate science. Gamification presents an innovative approach, as explored in CATAN - New Energies, a board game designed to incorporate climate dynamics and the energy-carbon nexus concept. Through realistic gameplay, students explore trade-offs between urban growth, fossil fuels, and renewable energy while encountering events that mirror real-world climate impacts. Initial evaluations with focus groups suggest that gameplay enhances engagement and influences attitudes, with outcomes varying based on students' familiarity with climate change concepts or their proficiency in board game strategy. These findings validate the use of CATAN - New Energies alongside an evaluation instrument as an effective approach for teaching sustainability concepts. Furthermore, they underscore the potential of gamification to deepen understanding of climate issues and promote sustainable thinking among undergraduate students.

This study investigates the comprehension and application of circular economy and bioeconomy principles among PhD students in biotechnology. The findings revealed that students possess a solid grasp of these core principles. However, there is a need for enhanced practical integration, particularly within the context of biotechnology applications. The study emphasizes the significant potential of circular economy and bioeconomy principles for addressing sustainability challenges in the biotechnology industry, such as such as minimizing waste generation and maximizing resource efficiency, developing sustainable bio-based products, and addressing climate change. Students highlighted the need for interdisciplinary approaches to foster a holistic understanding of sustainability. The study emphasizes the crucial role of interdisciplinary collaboration and practical skills, such as systems thinking and life cycle assessment, in empowering future generations of biotechnologists to develop innovative solutions that address these sustain ability challenges. Students proposed a range of innovative ideas, such as designing bioprocesses for maximum resource efficiency and developing novel bio-based materials, demonstrating the significant potential of circular economy and bioeconomy principles in driving a more sustainable future.

This study explores qualitative feedback provided by professors and ChatGPT 40 version when evaluating conclusions of laboratory reports. The experiment involves validating the final moisture content of shredded carrot through material balance calculations and thermogravimetric analysis. While reports are team-based, conclusions are individually written, resulting in 60 unique submissions focused on the argumentation of variations between estimated and measured moisture content. Thirdsemester students in the Bioengineering and Chemical Processes pathway at Tecnologico de Monterrey participated in this lab, part of the course “Application of the Principles of Conservation of Matter in Chemical and Biological Processes” (IQ1001B). Four professors established feedback guidelines, which were also provided to the AI. Advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques were used to evaluate feedback, employing the Sentence-Transformer model ('all-MiniLM-L6-v2') to generate semantic embeddings and calculate cosine similarity. Statistical methods, including Shapiro-Wilk, paired t-tests, Wilcoxon signedrank, and Friedman tests, analyzed semantic alignment and significant differences. The study evaluates whether AI can provide feedback that aligns semantically with human input, focusing on the model's ability to identify meaning and context, emphasizing scalability and efficiency in large-scale STEM education, contributing to student-centered learning in 21st-century education.

Undergraduate students' perceptions of plastic waste are concerning, as they play a vital role in shaping the sustainable solutions that they will develop as professionals. STEM majors are key in reshaping undergraduates' understanding of global issues through problem-solving and competence-based learning. Moreover, the systems thinking competence is important for endorsing possible solutions to plastic pollution issues. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate and reshape the current reasoning of students regarding plastic pollution through systems thinking and life cycle assessment (LCA). The results show how this approach reduces biases in assessing the most viable option for tackling the ubiquitous plastic pollution issue by revealing hidden environmental impacts in alternatives to oil-derived plastics and misconceptions about plastic production processes and demonstrate how students recognize LCA as a valuable tool for evaluating the sustainability of plastic alternatives. Most importantly the students reshaped their perspectives by addressing the issue of plastic pollution from a broader perspective considering the environmental impacts of possible alternatives for plastic production towards sustainability.