The project, a collaboration between Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University, is developing and evaluating vertically-integrated projects (VIP) that support multidisciplinary teams of undergraduates working on design projects embedded in the research efforts pursued by faculty members and their graduate students. The project is expanding the existing Purdue effort and initiating a new program at Georgia Institute of Technology. The design of the VIP program utilizes large, vertically-integrated teams and long-term, for-credit, design experiences similar to those developed in the EPICS program. The investigators are creating multi-site collaborative VIP efforts and developing and sharing course modules to enable students joining VIP teams to come up to speed quickly on the technologies fundamental to their design projects. The evaluation effort, led by an independent expert, is using student and faculty surveys and interviews along with social network analysis to monitor the project's progress. Instructional materials and evaluation results are being disseminated through a discipline specific website (i. e., the ConneXions site), through conference presentation, and through journal publications. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the project's materials and results, particularly the social network data on student and faculty experiences and collaboration patterns, along with a special focus on the project's impact on women and underrepresented minorities in the evaluation study.
