The Outcomes of an Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Course Involving Engineering, Science and Arts

An interdisciplinary undergraduate course that simultaneously involves the disciplines of Engineering, Science and Arts has been created and offered every semester since the Fall 2009 at our college. This course uses a robotic conducting system as a vehicle to bring together students majoring in mechanical engineering, computer science, interactive multimedia and music, and encourages them to share their knowledge and reach across the boundaries of their own disciplines. It is a project-based course that fosters creative problem-solving approaches, and advances computational thinking skills through an open-ended project requiring the synthesis of knowledge in robotics, interactive multimedia, computer science, and music. The model and implementation of the first offering of this course were presented in the 2010 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. This paper presents the outcomes of all the past three offerings including evaluations and assessments, our findings, and student deliverables. These analytical results will improve our understanding of effective approaches to teaching interdisciplinary courses that involve engineering and non-engineering disciplines in undergraduate collaborative problem-solving environments.