Software Engineering Students meet Interdisciplinary Project work and Art

Do software engineering students need inter- disciplinary skills? Do students learn different things from an interdisciplinary project work than from software development projects? How can a specific interdisciplinary project course be orga- nized? This paper provides reflections about these questions, based on the experience gained through running a project-based interdisciplinary course thrice. This course is part of the master degree education at the NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Stu- dents taking the course work in teams of five, of- ten coming from study programs of quite different disciplines. There is no predefined project assign- ment, instead the teacher has only described an open-ended theme, within which different student teams then define their own project assignment. The paper provides some reflections and lessons learned that can be exploited for designing simi- lar interdisciplinary team project courses in other universities.