An Interdisciplinary Capstone Course on Creative Product Development with Cross-College Collaboration

Abstract

This paper presents an interdisciplinary capstone course for creative product development with cross-college collaboration in a research-intensive university. The primary focus of this course is to give undergraduate students the experience of owning their problem through finding and defining a novel and useful problem by themselves. Then, they solve the problem by creating a corresponding product as an interdisciplinary team. To accomplish this goal at Seoul National University, a teaching team was formed with cross-college faculty from the electrical, mechanical, information, industrial, and architectural engineering departments. This paper reports how to integrate this course into a research-intensive engineering college, where both students and faculty are possibly unsympathetic to or skeptical of this top-down education approach. Our assessment method is highlighted to evaluate a student's work regarding creative and interdisciplinary learning. The impact of the cultural learning context is also considered in the course. We present our findings, the lessons learned, limitations observed and recommendations with how this course extends to building a new academic makerspace at SNU.