Building Interdisciplinary Collaboration Skills Through a Green Engineering Capstone Design Experience

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Interdisciplinary (99)This project is creating new learning materials and teaching strategies to support and enhance interdisciplinary design education. The project team is drawing on existing scholarship and conducting novel classroom research on interdisciplinary student collaborations to identify key issues and learning opportunities. The teaching materials and practices will help students 1) understand the challenges and benefits of working with colleagues from other fields, 2) plan and organize projects involving multiple disciplines, 3) productively negotiate the conflicts and challenges common to interdisciplinary collaboration, and 4) integrate knowledge and approaches from multiple disciplines to develop successful design projects. The materials and practices are being implemented and assessed in an interdisciplinary capstone design course through a Green Engineering Program, which draws students from all engineering disciplines, including materials science, engineering science and mechanics, and biological systems engineering. The program focuses on designing materials, processes, systems, and devices in ways that minimize environmental impact (including energy utilization and waste production) throughout a product or process life cycle. The complexity of Green Engineering makes it an ideal test case for the proposed teaching material. Innovative solutions to environmental challenges require an interdisciplinary approach and mitigate the extent to which students can simply divide the labor by discipline. This project effectively enhances ongoing efforts, prompts additional programs to develop interdisciplinary experiences, and provides universities with measurable outcomes that can be both taught and assessed.