The effect of gender on the motivation of engineering students participating on multinational design projects

Nowadays global collaborative environments in the corporate world require engineers with professional global competences. In response to such need, different active-learning initiatives have been introduced in academia to prepare engineering students with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitude to be competitive in the global market. Consequently, multinational design projects have been used by the authors as means of introducing professional global skills to engineering students while exposing them to a project-based learning experience. This educational activity faces many challenges including cultural and academic background differences, language and time zone barriers, and issues with communication tools among others. Therefore, this activity is expected to motivate students so they can start developing the professional skills that will help them to overcome difficulties and to carry out the project successfully. This work studies the motivation of students before and after participating in a multinational design project and makes a comparison of this parameter's results based on the effect of gender. To accomplish this objective, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was adapted to the multinational experience and administered to the participating students. For this study, three motivation constructs are taken into consideration: (a) interest/enjoyment, (b) perception of choice, and (c) perceived competence. Results are discussed based on the research questions posted for this work, and some reflections based on the results are presented.