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Team Building in Multidisciplinary Client-Sponsored Project Courses

Published: 24 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Experience working in multidisciplinary teams is important both to prepare Computer Science (CS) students for industry and to improve their communication with teammates from disciplines other than their own. This article describes the evolution and results of collaborations among three courses: an undergraduate CS course about user interface design and implementation, an undergraduate Scientific and Technical Communication (STC) course about usability and instructions writing, and a graduate CS/Human Factors course about user-interface evaluation and usability testing. Students from all three courses work with scientists to complete the scientist-sponsored citizen science Android applications (apps). Students from the undergraduate CS and STC courses form multidisciplinary teams to design and implement apps, while the graduate students consult with the teams by evaluating and user-testing the apps. The collaboration's effectiveness was assessed using student surveys, interviews, and evaluations of student work. This article compares the collaboration within the teams and the coordination with the scientists across two years of activities in order to determine the effectiveness of course modifications. The article concludes with recommendations for improving the collaboration within teams and the coordination with clients in multidisciplinary course projects.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 15, Issue 4
Special Issue on Team Projects in Computing Education
December 2015
145 pages
EISSN:1946-6226
DOI:10.1145/2850426
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 November 2015
Accepted: 01 October 2014
Revised: 01 July 2014
Received: 04 February 2014
Published in TOCE Volume 15, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Multidisciplinary teams
  2. human--computer interaction (HCI)
  3. interdisciplinary teams

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  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • National Science Foundation

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  • (2024)Faculty, Student, and Community Partner Experiences in Computer and Information Science Service LearningACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/365467824:3(1-26)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
  • (2023)CISing Up Service Learning: A Systematic Review of Service Learning Experiences in Computer and Information ScienceACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/361077623:3(1-56)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Multidisciplinary Hackathons: Towards Developing Practical Software Engineering Skills2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343214(01-09)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
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