Study on interest and perception of value in multinational collaborative design projects among engineering students

Abstract

The level of interest and perceived value of engineering students in a multinational collaborative design project experience is reported in this paper. The report establishes a comparison based on geographical location and class standing of the participants. For this purpose, a survey was used to collect demographic data and students’ feedback on questions based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) survey, which permits to evaluate five constructs, being interest and perceived value the ones considered in this work as indicators of motivation. The data was collected from students participating in the collaborative design project. These students were at seven institutions in six countries (USA, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, and Italy). The analysis of the data collected shows that students have a high level of interest and value the experience, with some numerical differences based on geographic location and class standing, but only significant difference based on class standing. These results are of importance when considering multinational collaborations in a generation of students moving towards a smart society, indicating a level of motivation that is mainly affected by academic maturity.