Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research and Support (PELARS) is a project about learning and making. The PELARS project finds ways of generating "analytics" (data about the learning process and analysis of this data), which helps learners and teachers by providing feedback from hands-on, project-based and experiential learning situations. In this paper, we present our proposal for improving analytics education with hands-on, project-based and experimental scenarios for engineering students. This is done through teacher and learner engagement, user studies and evaluated trials, performed at UCV (University of Craiova, Romania) and DTU Diplom (Technical University of Denmark, Campus Ballerup, Denmark). The PELARS project provides technological tools and ICT-based methods for collecting activity data ( moving image-based and embedded sensing) for learning analytics (data-mining and reasoning) of practice-based and experiential STEM.