ABSTRACT
The European Higher Education Area promotes the acquisition of professional skills associated with solving real problems through the use of active teaching methodologies. The development of these competences for literate citizens in the knowledge society constitutes a complex process that involves diverse knowledge and systemic relationships between different stakeholders. This chapter aims to show a project to develop professional competences of engineering and mathematics teaching areas based on real professional proposals, using environments recreated in immersive worlds. Special attention has been paid to the importance of interaction with professionals from different sectors. Several role-playing situations for specific cases of participation in public contracts, technical assistance and curricular designs were designed. These role-playing situations were set up by professionals from the sector (policymakers, owners, etc.) and developed under an immersive worlds environment. In this way, students had to interact as the different stakeholders of the processes working on the corresponding documentation associated to the professional role played under the support and assessment of the professionals. Students’ perceptions about their abilities to develop professional tasks were used to evaluate the experience. Results indicate that participants’ professional confidence was improved after this learning experience. This suggests that immersive worlds are a suitable tool to design teaching proposals that elicit students’ engagement and development of competences. The benefits of such proposals are also discussed.
