The multidisciplinary engineering design course described in this paper was conceived to give students the opportunity to practice both discipline specific and inter-disciplinary collaborative tasks in the solution of a design problem requiring diverse skills. The authors recommend an educational model that provides ongoing weekly panel reviews between multidisciplinary student teams engaged in a design project and a multidisciplinary mentoring panel. The format developed as the principal investigators/mentors realized they were able to provide teams diverse live feedback from the different perspectives of their disciplines. In a format resembling interactive reality TV talent shows the faculty panel critiqued the "performances" of the design teams' progress on a weekly basis. The format not only provided critical project technical guidance and project tracking but had the added bonus of enhancing the students' soft skills through weekly presentations. The course combined second-year mechanical and electrical majors on 15 teams whose semester project, Mobile Vehicle for Hazardous Waste Cleanup, was chosen for its multidisciplinary components requiring both parallel and integrated efforts on the part of the students. The mentoring panel was comprised of 3 technical faculty (2 Mechanical, 1 Electrical) and 1 Communications faculty, each offering different views and recommendations to the teams. Seventy-five students were surveyed about their satisfaction with the course and project. The students acknowledged several dynamics that evolved from the multidisciplinary format as positive: (1) A cumulative effect of multidisciplinary information gathering; (2) Eye-opening preparation for future work with other disciplines (learning what other disciplines do, how they approach problems differently); (3) The unexpected acquisition of skills in the "other" disciplines. The students acknowledged the following challenges: (1) Lack of understanding of the other disciplines (jargon, technical skills) (2) Difficulty of combining the multidisciplinary subsystems of the project into their design.
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