Fostering Soft Skills through Cross-disciplinary Robotics Mentorship

Success in the professional engineering workplace increasingly requires soft skills in addition to technical knowledge. Faculty and curriculum constraints present higher education with significant challenges for fostering soft skills in engineering students. This paper provides an overview of an interdisciplinary model, involving undergraduate engineering students and mathematics teacher candidates, to co-design STEM-related workshops for a high school robotic club in an after-school mentoring program. Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from the 25 mentors across three years, we elaborate on the model's effectiveness through the lens of soft skills development. We share the journey of how these mentors collaborate and interact with their cross-disciplinary colleagues and serve as mentors for high school students. We then report empirical evidence on how the social interaction embedded in our design model enhances the engineering and education mentors' soft skill development in Teamwork, Presentation, Leadership, and Adaptability skills. We also discuss the implications and recommendations for further research based on our findings.