Mobile App Development: A Cross-Discipline Team-Based Approach to Student and Faculty Learning

Technical courses taught in a university setting are academically rigorous in a given subject area. However, students do not usually get an adequate sense of how the professionals in their field interact with their counterparts in other professions in the real world. The aim of our cross-disciplinary "Mobile App Development" course is to remedy this missed opportunity by providing an opportunity for students and faculty members from three different disciplines (engineering, computer science, and business) to experience and learn the nuances of each other's' fields, while simultaneously introducing the concept of entrepreneurship. Such an unorthodox mix of students sharing a single classroom calls for non-traditional teaching strategies and evaluation techniques. This paper discusses those techniques, the challenges involved in meeting the stated outcomes, and three iterations of refinements in the evolution of the course leading up to its current format. An interesting aspect of the course is that each cross-disciplinary student team is expected to deliver a "close-to-market" mobile application product by the end of the course that is jointly assessed by the course professors and external judges from industry. Lastly, although this course requires significant teaching effort, the instructors, the participating students, and our university are convinced that the benefits of such collaborative learning are worthy of further investments.