This year-long course for BAScT students (Individualized Major) aims to expand the transdisciplinary training after the completion of the previous Transdisciplinary Guided Study courses, with a central emphasis on problem solving skills, analytic tools, and solution evaluations. Each student will work with the course instructor and academic supervisor on an identified real-world problem. Through the course learning, students are expected to become capable of conducting empirical analysis to understand complex issues; and develop preliminary and executable ideas of solutions to address (the whole or parts of) the problem.

In the first semester (Problem Solving I), students will deepen their understanding about the real-world problems they have identified in GS courses, by studying different components of a target problem from social, cultural, economic and/or technological perspectives. Students are required to learn one problem solving skill that is relevant to their analytic tasks; and apply it into their own project development exercises.

In the second semester (Problem Solving II), students will explore possible solutions to the target problems, by addressing the issues they have studied. Students are required to learn the second problem solving and project management skills that are supplementary to the first learnt skill. Students will also learn how to implement the solutions to a good extent (preferably in cooperation with multiple stakeholders), and test or evaluate the implementations. At the end of the course students will need to provide a report on their solution proposal’s novel aspects, advantages, and limitations, by consolidating the transdisciplinary knowledge and skills they have learnt along the whole academic year.