Using a design document to support interdisciplinary learning

One goal of the project, wireless multimedia communications for virtual environments, is to create an integrated educational program in which faculty members in different disciplines work closely together to mentor larger teams of students and create solutions to complex problems that combine human factors, computer graphics, real systems, wearable computers, and wireless devices. We are developing new classes at the senior and graduate levels that cover software engineering for virtual environments, the design of practical wireless devices, and the codesign of embedded systems. A key issue that is central to the course development is the strategy for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Independent of the course organization, the virtual reality research environment is used as a common theme among the courses, thus providing a basis for problem-based learning. In this case, our objective is to define the problem so that students in different engineering disciplines (electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, systems engineering) have the necessary discipline-specific information and also understand the multidisciplinary aspects of the problem. To that end, we have been exploring the design documentation used in the disciplinary areas. In this paper, we present the course development and the use of a design document to support learning objectives.