Artigo completo:

The present research aims to analyze the experience of design students cooperating in an international design team to solve a common problem. The Bachelor Course of Design at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) offered to its students a new opportunity to have an international experience without leaving Recife. During the first semester of 2019, UFPE started to test a new kind of internationalization called COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) which aims to give international experience to the students. With COIL the students participate in collaborative activities in partnership with foreign universities. Based on this model, we used one of the disciplines from the Design bachelor course, Techniques for Alternative Generation and Selection (TGSA) and altered it to allow our students make activities in partnership with the students from two other universities, the Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) in the Netherlands and The State University of New York (SUNY) in the United States of America. Therefore, the students were divided into multinational groups, to use design methods learned in class and show up with a solution for a given problem, this problem/question was chosen by the professors from all three universities and was "plastic pollution". The number of students from each country was: 28 from Brazil, 18 from the United States and 10 from the Netherlands. The students were divided into groups, being a total of 8 groups. Each group should contain Americans, Dutch, and Brazilians. For the graduation’s students at the Federal University of Pernambuco, the challenge was not only the English language but also how to teach, organize the process and convince the international students to use some method of design to develop a solution for the problem. With this research, we observed both the student’s experience and the differences between the methodology in Brazil, Netherlands and the United States of America used during the creative process. Furthermore, was applied a questionnaire with the students where they evaluated how the experience was perceived by them. As a result, we identified differences between the design methodology applied to those universities and evaluate the student’s experience during the subject.