Border-crossing with competition then collaboration in a challenge-driven design and communication experience for engineering and science students

The authors (professors of mechanical engineering, physics, and professional communication) are collaboratively designing and teaching an intensive multidisciplinary design program in which undergraduate engineering and science students will tackle one of the National Academy of Engineering´s Grand Challenges during ten weeks in the summer. The first offering of the program will focus on designing and building an inexpensive and locally manufacturable system that utilizes solar energy for power. The Summer 2013 program is a brand new offering and has been inspired by both our own and our students´ yearnings for broader interdisciplinary experiences, where classroom knowledge can be applied to a `real world´, humanitarian problem. The borders we expect our students and ourselves to cross in this program include borders of culture and of disciplinary major. Stakeholders for the design will come from cultures outside of the student´s own; in particular, students will be asked to design for implementation in Kenya. An undergraduate student from Kenya will be joining us on campus to advise and serve as a representative client for the project design. From among our own student applicants, we have accepted a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary group. During the summer program, students will be organized into multidisciplinary teams based on two different models. After a shared class-wide problem-definition phase, each multidisciplinary team initially will propose competing designs for evaluation. At this midpoint, the class will choose a winning design for further development and teams will be reassigned into collaborative subsystem groups, each building a component of the final product. This structure - due to the interdependent nature of each team´s subsystem design on performance capability of the entire system-will emphasize to students the importance of communication throughout the program.