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Contribution: This study identifies the skills required by the faculty to mentor first-year interdisciplinary design projects. The findings are compiled as a set of themes that can act as a guide for engineering educators in mentoring interdisciplinary design projects. Background: The National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Engineer of 2020 report states that developing solutions to real-world problems requires engineers to possess skills to access, understand, evaluate, synthesize, and apply information and knowledge from multiple disciplines. However, most engineering students possess strong monodisciplinary expertise and skills, which are insufficient when students graduate and work in the industry. In order to equip engineers to solve real-world problems, engineering education should focus on building competencies and bringing the flavor of interdisciplinary education into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. While there is a growing call to introduce interdisciplinary courses to undergraduate engineering students, the ability of the faculty to teach and mentor students from multiple disciplines is a concern. Research Question: This study qualitatively investigates the question, "What skills do engineering faculty consider important to mentor first-year interdisciplinary engineering projects?" Methodology: The study is situated in a project-based learning course offered at first-year engineering at a university in India. It identifies the skills a faculty needs to possess to mentor students working on interdisciplinary (mechatronic) design projects through thematic analysis of faculty and student interviews. Findings: Performing qualitative analysis on the data collected from the two sources, including semistructured interviews with the faculty and students focus group discussion, reveals three dimensions on which the engineering faculty needs to be trained on. It included project management and interpersonal and interdisciplinary skills.

Contribution: This study identifies the attributes of complexity that can be incorporated into engineering design problems at first-year undergraduate engineering projects. The findings are compiled as a set of guidelines to aid engineering educators in crafting design problems. Background: Engineering professionals solve complex problems like design problems, troubleshooting problems, system-analysis problems, and decision-making problems. To develop proficiency in solving such problems, accreditation bodies for engineering education mandate the development of knowledge and skills for solving complex problems. The literature presents several attributes of complexity, but it does not clearly state which of these attributes are relevant for first-year engineering problem-solving and incorporate them into the engineering curriculum. Research Question: This study qualitatively investigates the research question, "How to craft engineering design problems with known attributes of complexity for first-year undergraduate engineering education?" Methodology: The study is situated in a project-based learning course offered at first-year engineering at a university in India. It identifies the attributes of complexity in interdisciplinary (mechatronic) design projects (prototypes) through thematic analysis of faculty interviews. Further, this was validated by analyzing the prototypes. Findings: Several themes of complexity emerged; this article presents only two themes: (1) knowledge; and (2) skills related to solving the engineering design problem and the types of relationships between the prototype's functions.

The study investigates the impact of establishing the different scaffolding models toward better percolation of knowledge and skills required to build a functional prototype in a first-year engineering Project Based Learning course. To facilitate students to design and build a mechatronics system, scaffolding students at various project phases is crucial. To cater to the need, scaffolding by the teacher all the time for all the project phases for a large classroom of students was challenging. Thus, there was a need to establish multiple scaffolding models to effectively scaffold students without burdening the teacher. This motivated the authors to establish the five scaffolding models. Data was collected from students and teachers involved in the course to measure the effectiveness of scaffolding models. Student data was collected through focus group discussion, while an interview was carried out with faculty to capture the data. The results reveal that designing multiple scaffolding models helped students to get just in time help to complete the projects and resulted in better design skills. The paper's outcomes help educators design scaffolding models for the PBL course in engineering for a large classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]