In engineering education students are increasingly challenged to solve complex socio-technological problems. However, there are many uncertainties in solving those 'ill-defined wicked problems'. For students, dealing with uncertainty is not easy to master. In the minor and master programmes of Science Education and Communication at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, living Labs ('C-labs') are used to teach students to deal with real-life complex communication problems in technological innovation processes. Students collaborate in teams of four persons, all from different technological disciplines. Each team works closely with professionals who face the problem in practice. In the C-labs, design methodology is used to approach the problems in a structured way. In this study we raise the question: how do students deal with uncertainties in solving complex problems in the C-labs? To answer this question we identified 3 sources of uncertainty: attributed to the individual, to the social context and to the task [7] and monitored the students during the design process by means of surveys and interviews. Data analysis shows that students perceive all 3 kinds of uncertainty in the various stages of the design process. They use of a broad variety of responses to tackle uncertainty. The outcomes can be used to improve our ways to help students to deal with uncertainties.

Scientists have always played an important role in informing policy decisions. However, many controversial policy problems regarding science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology, are often characterised by low value consensus and high level of complexity. In these circumstances various policy actors legitimate their policy preferences using science. In this article, we challenge the linear model of science and policy and argue that the stakeholder model of science in policy is more appropriate for governance of controversial policy problems regarding science and technology. We build our argument on available literature and empirical data from interviews and two online surveys. We choose agricultural biotechnology as the case study to illustrate scientists' perception about their role in policy-making. Our study illustrates that agricultural biotechnology scientists sympathise with the stakeholder model of science and policy. However, there is a gap between perceived ideal role for scientists in policy-making and the role, which these scientists actually take.