2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Raise Your Hand is an immersive, interactive sensor-driven dynamic art exhibit. Vision tracking software changes the video projections, mechatronics, and music composition in response to the height of a visitor’s raised arm. The 1 ½-year project brought together students and faculty from computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and music technology. Further, students were integrated into the project in different forms, including capstone design teams, Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) students, extracurricular high school students, and a graduate student. Bringing this heterogeneity into harmony was a significant undertaking. We discuss some challenges we faced while managing the project and the ways in which we navigated those challenges. This work has value for the multidisciplinary engineering community by offering resources and recommendations for integrating engineering and the arts within an experiential project-based learning context. We describe challenges related to disciplinary language, real-time feedback, project timelines, and project documentation.

Originally, all four of the disciplinary groups presented their progress in the weekly VIP class meetings. However, the students wanted more time to talk with each other, particularly with students not in their disciplinary group. In response, the faculty moved to an alternating schedule having two disciplinary groups give oral presentations and the other two post written updates, leaving the rest of the time unstructured.

Weekly meetings were important to achieve a cohesive overall design, but also highlighted disciplinary differences. The first challenge was helping these groups adequately describe their products without assuming a shared disciplinary language. Requiring a sub-system block diagram and brief accomplishments, set-backs, recoveries, and next milestone in the weekly presentations was helpful. Originally, the faculty got too “in the weeds” with their real-time feedback to keep the interest of the rest of the students. Instead, the faculty made quick notes during the oral updates about their questions and then talked in depth with selected students about those questions after the oral updates.

Further, the contingent relations between project elements meant that different groups experienced timeline crunches at different times. For instance, the networking sub-team had to deal with critical issues at the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester. These students then needed to be redirected to other aspects of the project once the issues were resolved, which sometimes entailed moving students onto tasks that required a significant learning curve. Finally, to track individual student work and progress, the project team developed a system for electronic lab notebooks with weekly due dates.

The set for the exhibit was constructed in the lab and had to be moved to its display location for a November show. Assisting with disassembly, moving, re-assembly and after the show moving it back to the lab were required for all the students involved. These activities ended up being excellent team-building exercises.

This paper offers insight into successful (and not-so-successful) methods of navigating multidisciplinary dynamics in a long-term large-scale collaboration. We hope that this presentation of lessons learned will support similar educators who want to integrate the arts and engineering.