Mind and Machine: Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

As the world becomes more sophisticated and socio-economically complex, interdisciplinarity (collaboration among two or more disciplines) has become ever more important. In particular, in the field of education, interdisciplinarity is known to enhance creativity and the capacity of people to work together. However, some drawbacks, such as the lack of solid expertise in one specific discipline, have also been exposed. A simple and efficient way of implementing an interdisciplinary study is reported to be one that combines areas that are computable (i.e., science and engineering) and non-computable (i.e., emotions or abstractions often found in the arts and humanities). This approach has been verified in studies conducted in the last four years on mostly firstand second-year undergraduate students with different majors, with close to 1,000 participants, and has successfully shown to yield diverse mixing between different disciplines, with approximately 300 different outcomes. This particular approach to interdisciplinarity is easy and simple to implement, yields different interconnections among various disciplines, exhibits clear measures of success, and can be done along with expertise training in a traditional field.

Artificial Mind: Interdisciplinary Learning

“…For instance, it is difficult to imagine the discipline of engineering without a mathematics and science background. Recently, a number of proposals have been made (Yakman, 2008;Jolly, 2015) to add an art or design approach (Kramer et al, 2000) into the program, and STEM then became known as STEAM (Connor et al, 2015;Song, 2017) (Fig.1). Nevertheless, it can be seen that while the interdisciplinarity between STEM and arts-related fields may be interesting, it appears to be rather difficult to practically implement in education.…”