Interdisciplinary Project-Based Learning: An Experience with Digital Games and Music Production Students

This innovative practice full paper presents an inter-disciplinary Project-Based Learning (IPBL) approach that relies on a challenge as a key part of the learning process. A project is proposed to the students from the perspective of creating a direct association between learning and doing. In this paper, we present a variation of PBL adding the interdisciplinary factor: we united students from different areas (digital games and music production) under the common objective of producing a complete sounded digital game. An additional difficulty was overcome since all classes took place remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To accomplish this challenge, a remote structure of classes was created to facilitate interaction between students as much as possible. During one semester, 2 groups of undergraduates from these two areas studied different modules organized in parallel under the general objective of an integrative project. The integrated project spanned 17 weeks, with classes structured to accommodate the evolving needs of project development. Initially, the first three weeks operated independently, allowing for focused exploration within each module. Subsequently, collaborative efforts were emphasized during weeks 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, and 15, fostering synergy and collective progress across both domains. Game students were given the mission of producing a game from scratch. To music production students the mission was making a full package of sound and music to each respective game. Facing a common schedule, all students had periodic meetings to align production and deadlines. In the end 10 games were produced and sounded. Initial hypotheses were raised about what we expected because of this experience. To assist in the analysis of the results, all the students involved responded to surveys about what they experienced. The successes and the need for improvements observed are detailed in this paper based on the application of the proposed methodology during the period in question.