Higher education in Italy is historically built on monodisciplinary
courses with a focus on individual discipline, where students are
primarily recipients of information (passive learning). In multidisciplinary,
interdisciplinary, and more so transdisciplinary educational settings,
instead, students take an active role in their own learning (active
learning), are prompted to find and elaborate connections between
apparently distant disciplines, and are offered the opportunity to
build cross-sectional knowledge. This is of utmost importance for
first-year undergraduate students from scientific schools who deal
with sciences such as physics, mathematics, and chemistry, sometimes
without a real perspective on what these disciplines are important
for. Here, we present and discuss the design of a one-day (7 h) transdisciplinary
workshop comprising a series of transdisciplinary and integrated tasks
purposedly designed to guide student toward fundamental aspects of
biochemistry, building upon the knowledge and competences acquired
in a chemistry/organic chemistry course. The workshop was meant to
consolidate and increase the student’s awareness of the relevance
of chemistry/organic chemistry to understanding biochemistry, and
to stimulate curiosity on the connections between the two disciplines.
Moreover, being mostly built on teamwork, the workshop also aimed
to practice and improve soft skills. Analysis of an anonymous survey
taken by the students at completion of the workshop clearly indicated
that transdisciplinarity, collaborative learning, and practice of
soft skills were perceived as added values of the proposed educational
setting.