Meeting reality: Learning with collaborative and multidisciplinary approach

Abstract

Today's world faces frequent global challenges due to human, environmental, and technological factors. Multidisciplinary collaboration in engineering, science, and technology programs aims to generate innovative solutions to increasingly complex problems. Soft skills promote collaboration on complex, multidisciplinary projects. Effective communication, agile project management, and facilitation skills are essential for meeting project, challenge, or problem objectives. A qualitative case study at a private university highlights the development of soft skills through interdisciplinarity. Senior engineering students work collaboratively to solve real challenges, enhancing their communication and teamwork abilities, and recognizing their own and their peers' strengths. Participatory decision-making methodology and technology help students develop these competencies and solve the real-world challenges, which will benefit their future careers. The methodology is qualitative approach, using the case study method to analyze two generations of students from different engineering programs in a multidisciplinary course, with a challenge-based learning strategy, developing soft skills. The instruments used were reports with reflections linked to the lessons learned and proposals obtained as a team, as well as the evaluation of soft skills. Analysis of the results allows us to observe how students learn to value social skills from the perspective of different academic programs while also becoming aware of their own abilities (both disciplinary and personal), leading them to find innovative solutions to the challenges they face.