Conversation with Mark Yim

Jake Welde connected me with Mark Yim, his advisor from undergrad at Penn, for advice on running an interdisciplinary course. He spoke from his experience with a course called “Advanced Mechatronics in Reactive Spaces” in which ME and Arch students collaborated with a professional artist to produce a show. My notes:

He managed enrollment by running two separate courses which happened to meet at the same time.
This allowed for different grading policies and different recruitment in each department. (From my perspective, there’s value in trying to transform each discipline, so even if I had the opportunity to distinguish the course on each side I’m not sure I would.)
In Mark’s class, students mostly worked in their areas of strength; they learned the basics of the other side informally through collaboration. I think my course is going to stress interdisciplinary learning more, as one of my goals is transformation of both CS and educational technology.
Student team projects mostly worked asynchronously.
The biggest challenge was culture. When you take on a project with an external audience, it has to work. You’ve gotta come through. Some students treated it as regular coursework where, ok, fine you get a low grade.
It’s important to build in multiple redundancies. Not every project is going to achieve what it sets out to do.
He had a boot camp structure where students with each competency do a dive into the other field of exptertise.
Mark described this class as extermely rewarding but also the most stressful class he’s ever taught.
I asked about recruiting across departments and getting the class seen as legitimate; he said politics is always going to be part of everything you do.
In inter-departmental relationships, people matter most. Find advocates on the other side.
Reach out to departmental PR people for publicity.