Work in progress: multidisciplinary engineering project abroad

The convergence of scientific and engineering disciplines in current applications requires engineers to have multidisciplinary teamwork skills. This paper describes an international experience that brought together students in engineering, science, social science and the humanities to work on a project that requires technical, foreign language, and research skills. The focus of the experience was to have students work in multidisciplinary teams to develop a chronological map of the city of Cordoba, Spain. They used a geographical information system (GIS) application to develop the map layers, and they constructed Web pages that are linked to the map. This paper summarizes experiences from the first offering in the summer of 2003. We also present planned improvements for the evaluation of the next offering in December 2004.