Lessons learnt from Interdisciplinary Class between Mechatronics and Computer Science students

As the boundaries of research and industry stretches from one discipline to the other, it is necessary for higher education to change to meet this need. This is even more difficult with the increase of class size and the limited resources to oversee and guide the students. The Mechatronics students and the Computer Science students meet in Embedded System 1 and 2 to learn on the development of an Embedded System. Here the different challenges for an interdisciplinary class will be investigated. Suitable methods will be proposed. Different lessons learnt concerning the differences and the similarities between these two disciplines will be discussed. This paper aims to tackle the challenges and gives a little insight on what is needed to conduct large interdisciplinary class with limited resources. The data for analysis in this paper was collected over five semesters through course evaluations and examination result.      «

As the boundaries of research and industry stretches from one discipline to the other, it is necessary for higher education to change to meet this need. This is even more difficult with the increase of class size and the limited resources to oversee and guide the students. The Mechatronics students and the Computer Science students meet in Embedded System 1 and 2 to learn on the development of an Embedded System. Here the different challenges for an interdisciplinary class will be investigated....     »