In engineering education, the integration of disciplinary, societal, and ecological perspectives is facilitated by boundary crossing. This competency is cultivated through boundary-crossing learning mechanisms and is considered essential for students in interdisciplinary challenges in complex learning environments. However, limited research exists on students' perceptions of their own learning processes when developing the complex skill of boundary crossing. This paper, therefore, investigates boundary-crossing learning mechanisms, sub-mechanisms, and frictions that drive learning. The authors qualitatively analysed 720 reflection documents from 180 students in a 2nd-year interdisciplinary engineering master's course. The study reveals a progression from recognising strengths to calibrating expectations, identifying weaknesses, and positioning within meaningful activities. Identity (I) Concepts were used to examine frictions in this process, showing students engaged with themes such as self-knowledge, interdisciplinary teamwork, relationship building, and approaches to culture, structure, and planning. These insights may inform the design of interdisciplinary engineering education as transformational learning journeys.

University students are asked to become all-round human beings, knowing how to be engaged in Engineering in the future, as well as wholly socialised and going through personal development steps. However, how and where are the students supposed to acquire these skills? Do we already have them in the Higher Education programmes and curricula? This article explores low threshold steps that can be taken to tweak the curriculum and implicit professionalisation of staff towards incorporating transversal skills and reflective activities that allow students to develop to their full potential.. One is a roadmap Workshop identifying guiding principles and touchpoint activities for curricular change. The other is a survey on how transversal skills are currently thought to have been embedded in the curriculum.

Universities open their doors to society, inviting the complexity of the world to enter engineering education through challenge-based courses. While working on complex issues, engineering students learn to deal with different kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty about the dynamics of a real-world challenge, the knowledge gaps in the problem, or the conflicting perspectives amongst the people involved. Although we know from previous research that students are likely to encounter these uncertainties in sustainability challenges, which metacognitive strategies they use to deal with them is unclear. We interviewed nine MSc students at the end of a challenge-based course at a Dutch university of technology. We asked the students how they dealt with uncertainty in collaboration with the commissioner, their student team, and the teachers. The interviews were analyzed through grounded, consensus-based coding by two researchers. Preliminary results show students use three main strategies. First, the different perspectives from peers in their team inform the position of the student. Second, students find expectation management of the commissioner essential, yet students struggle with how to do this in a professional and timely way. Third, students frame the uncertainties they encounter as part of the learning process, which allows them to accept the possibility of failure. This study provides first insights in metacognitive uncertainty strategies and suggests those strategies should become a more prominent topic in coaching students. When uncertainty becomes an explicit part of challenge-based education, students learn to deal with both the known and unknown in the transition to a sustainable society.

Often industry expects university graduates to hit the ground running. One way to deal with this expectation is to offer our graduates opportunities to collaborate with the industry - a collaboration to acquire theoretical skills and acumen in engineering practices and how a business works. Challenge-based learning environments intimated by the CDIO principles, which focus on real-life experiences, external stakeholder involvement, complex problem solving, and a focus explicitly on knowledge application, offer a rich environment that may allow the needed preparation. One of the proposed outcomes for students is the improved acquisition of professional capabilities. However, it is not established yet, whether these professional skills are acquired or strengthened in CBE settings. Professional capabilities focus on four levels; knowing oneself, critically thinking about the problem, collaborating, and having contextual and ethical awareness. In this study, we surveyed if students perceive improvement in applying professional skills. We particularly questioned professional skills enabling behaviors based on validated questionnaires of EPFL and Univ. Sydney. Additionally, we have gathered and analysed the peer feedback within teams on personal leadership. Contrary to the expectations, leadership skills and professional capabilities are unrelated.

In 2019, the authors came up with a vision of the future university for engineers. It describes a future situation and behaviour of ‘reflective engineers” who interact and behave in a particular way while engaging with technology. The vision is created with a Vision in Product Design (VIP) methodology from Hekkert & van Dijk. This vision of the future university starts with the idea that every one of us has personal ambitions, talents and interests that drives our interests and ways of working for the good of society at large. Nevertheless, at the start of our career, we may not be aware of these ambitions, talents and interests, and one needs to explore and reflect on a variety of challenges to discover: (1) In what way we would like to engage with technology (2) How would we like to work together in the technological domain (3) Whether we prefer to engage in slow/fast production cycles A reflective portfolio including engineering roles as a vehicle to become a deliberate professional will be embedded in the interdisciplinary master curriculum of biomedical engineering at the 3ME department at TU Delft. In this conceptual paper, we will expand on the design implementation process of the reflective engineer in challenge-based education following the vision of the future university.

Building with Nature (BwN) infrastructure designs are characterised by disciplinary integration, non-linearity, diverse and fluid design requirements, and long-term time frames that balance the limitations of earth’s natural systems and the socio-technical systems created by humans. Differentiating roles in the engineering design process may offer strategies for better solutions. Four complementary engineering design roles were distinguished, namely: Specialists, System Integrators, Front-end Innovators, and Contextual Engineers. The key research question addressed in this paper asks, how can the introduction of engineering roles enhance interdisciplinary processes for BwN design? Three Building with Nature design workshops with international groups of students from multiple disciplines and various education levels provided the ideal context for investigating whether engineering roles enhance such interdisciplinary ways of working. Results indicate that the application of engineering roles in each of the three workshops indeed supported interdisciplinary design. A number of conditions for successful implementation within an authentic learning environment could be identified. The engineering roles sustain an early, divergent way of looking at the design problem and support the search for common ground across the diverse perspectives of the team members, each bringing different disciplinary backgrounds to the design table. The chapter closes with a discussion on the value of engineering design roles and their significance for the Building with Nature approach.

1.1 Background To educate future competent engineers, it is crucial to adopt teaching and learning approaches that support students in dealing with highly complex problems [1]. One strategy is to enhance service mathematics in higher engineering education by shifting from outcome-centered to competence-centered approaches [2]. This strategy is examined and adopted in a large-scale innovation programme of mathematics education (PRIME) at TU Delft to design effective service mathematics courses in higher engineering education. As mathematics is at the core of engineering education, we will, in this workshop, explore how to create a viable and resilient educational model for developing mathematical competencies, described in the Framework of Mathematics Curricula in Engineering Education [2, 3]. Additionally, we will discuss how the development of mathematical competencies can be facilitated by leveraging technology in blended and remote learning environments. The aim of this workshop is to start a process via a living document which serves to share and create material and expertise in teaching, learning and assessing the mathematical competencies.