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Project Based Multidisciplinary Education for Undergraduates Abstract

Motivation: Integrating the multidisciplinary technologies, informatics, and the corresponding real-life applications is an important stimulating approach to promote the interests of students, especially undergraduates, in engineering study. A project based approach has been designed for engineering education based on multidisciplinary undergraduate research projects. The goal is to enhance student learning through a collaborative learning environment.

Approaches: The project based approach is carried out in a series of steps, including project design to be done by the mentors, student recruitment through various advertising strategies, group assignments for the recruited students, the harmonized work on the project (with weekly group meetings, student progress report, and group discussion), the outcomes dissemination at diverse local and national conferences, and project assessment by both student and mentors at the end of projects. This project based multidisciplinary education integrates classroom presentations, innovative teaching techniques, student active learning, group activities, and hands-on experience.

Results: Many multidisciplinary projects have been carried out at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI. Both the mentors and students have very positive feedback on the education and learning experiences. Students participating in the projects not only gained interdisciplinary education but also achieved research experience. Most of the students have attended or are going to graduate school with the confidence obtained from the projects. The multidisciplinary background gives advantages in their graduate school admissions and scholarship applications.

1. Introduction

Engineering education is critical for nurturing competitive and skilled engineers and has great influence for a nation’s competition ability in the current international high technology markets1. For most complex engineering and science problems, the solution can not be handled by one individual discipline. As most engineers required working on a project involving teamwork in a multidisciplinary environment, it is essential to tailor engineering education in a unique interdisciplinary atmosphere and cultivate our engineering students to be the leaders in the rapidly changing engineering fields.

It is a challenging task to design an effective interdisciplinary course or project. The collaborative experience model for construction undergraduates has been initiated to promote collaboration between architecture and construction management students2. The cooperative model is important to promote interaction between design and building education, and to develop other multidisciplinary approaches for integrating pedagogical models in many discipline- specific topics.

Many efforts have been made on design engineering capstone courses3-5. For example, integrating senior capstone courses using different pedagogical strategies have been designed for

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Wu, H. (2010, June), Project Based Multidisciplinary Education For Undergraduates Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16912