Team Building in a Project-Based Learning Course

Implementing a project-based approach in a core macroscale equipment design calculations course sounds like a good idea as students become motivated to learn fundamental concepts to accomplish their project design and at the same time develop team skills through an industry-like team approach. However, we find organizing the class into teams and assigning a project task is a small part of what needs to happen for those teams to function properly. Typically teams have considerable issues in terms of interpersonal relationships, schedule miss-matches, distribution of labor, and sharing leadership responsibilities. While there are websites that help with senior level design team performance these are not usually used for courses offered earlier in the curriculum. In a recent offering of a junior level two-credit one-semester Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer course we asked students to use a team-centered website originally developed for senior level integrated design course assessment and learning. The process begins with joint development of a team contract followed by team citizenship assessments for formative improvement of the team process during the semester. Finally a summative aspect is added in which team members rate each other on their contributions and achievements. The website provides the instructor a listing of team comments that affords ample opportunity for assessing team development. We find by use of the website that students who typically overwork to accomplish tasks left undone by others now begin to challenge others and encourage them to reach a higher potential. In this paper we document a case study for one particular team and demonstrate how use of a team-training website adds significant benefit to the team experience. Introduction Project-Based Learning has been touted as an excellent paradigm even for learning core fundamental principles in engineering and the sciences. Generally these Projects are conducted by a team and in many instances can be semester long or at least take up substantial portions of a course. While concept test results may be informative of student learning and student surveys may show affective gains it is difficult to document and determine how much of the learning took place as a result of the team Project-Based Learning process that would not have taken place otherwise. In this paper we present results surrounding the use of a team building instrument which to date has been limited to use in capstone design courses. This instrument is known as TIDEE and is part of what is now a web-based instrument known as Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Assessment and Learning System[1]. We applied three key team building and assessment features from the site namely a Team Contract, Team Member Citizenship and Teamwork Achieved response instruments. The instruments were used in a Project-Based Learning course where the Project drove the pedagogy with the novel use of Desktop Learning Modules for hands-on active discussions for conceptual understanding of principles in a junior-year twocredit one-semester Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer course. Our research questions are: 1) does the TIDEE assignment process serve to document that changes were indeed occurring to enhance team member involvement and productivity? and 2) When changes do occur can they be P ge 22410.2 attributed to the TIDEE process or would they have happened anyway as a result of natural interactions that occur in most if not all team activities. Effective Team Skill Development While functioning on effective teams is essential in industry Engineering practice [2, 3] students generally lack that ability and we cannot afford to let them graduate from our institutions without providing adequate training [4]. Despite this industrial norm the teaching of teamwork skills can be better integrated into our engineering curricula [5]. While this has motivated recent efforts to provide concerted efforts to teach design skills in capstone courses [6, 7], little has been done to our knowledge of implementing team skills development in pre-senior year fundamentals and calculation based courses as will be discussed in this paper.