Using cultural heterogeneity to improve soft skills in engineering and computer science education

Abstract

If an engineer obtains correct conclusions, but cannot communicate these results in a proper way, then the value of the achievements could be diminishing dramatically. Awareness about the importance of acquiring soft skills in addition to technical knowledge is often present in engineering education, but the issue is still how the improvement of these key competencies should be addressed. Often our engineering classes are heterogeneous, both with respect to pre-knowledge of the mathematical and technical skills, but also concerning the cultural background of the students. This can be an additional challenge for the teaching situation. Instead of considering the cultural heterogeneity as an obstacle, we decided to use it as an advantage for enhancing soft skills in a mathematics course. In this paper, we describe a multicultural-based teaching approach for improving soft skills in engineering and computer science education.