Work in progress: The steam powered pumpkin patch - How an extracurricular project is shedding light on professional skills development

Abstract

As the focus begins to shift from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math), a unique multidisciplinary project at The University of Texas at El Paso is shedding light on how extracurricular projects play a role in professional skills development. Students within the fields of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, art, graphic design, computer science, and bioscience were challenged to transverse a world of multidisciplinary interchanges to create an interactive pumpkin patch. Today's engineers need more than just a hard technical skills education. They will contribute more fully to their job and profession when armed with professional skills including communication proficiencies that are accrued from working in teams and experiencing multidisciplinary interchanges. Such practical skill sets take time and require contextual application to develop. We are in the first year of exploring how a traditional extracurricular project at [name removed] is being re-designed to be instrumental in developing these skills. We report on the first year of a longitudinal multi-year project to evaluate and design a problem based extracurricular activity in which students from both engineering and non-engineering majors collaborate to present a community exhibit.