Participation of mathematics and physics students in multidisciplinary challenge-based education at the end of a bachelor program

Many universities introduced Challenge-Based Education (CBE) as a way to innovate engineering education. Typically, in CBE students develop and use their knowledge in order to solve real-world problems in society, in multi-disciplinary groups and often in collaboration with external stakeholders. For departments of mathematics and physics innovations such as CBE are often not straightforward. In their strive for depth, they struggle for example with the multi-disciplinary nature of CBE. This study focused on the Bachelor Final Project in an innovation lab (IBFP) at a university of technology in the Netherlands. We have investigated the affordances and constraints for mathematics and physics students to participate in such IBFPs, and how these can be understood in terms of successful innovations in engineering education. Students from all departments can participate in IBFP, but mathematics and physics students have been practically absent. We investigated the reasons for this absence by studying university documents and interviewing stakeholders (N=13). We identified themes emerging from this data, which show that organizational issues played a role, but also factors related to educational innovations and the particular nature of mathematics and physics education. The study helps to understand innovation efforts towards CBE, involving mathematics and physics students.