Experiences with designing a team project module for teaching teamwork to students

Abstract

Team projects play an important role in the education of engineers. This paper describes a team project module that is part of a postgraduate course in informatics. Its main objective is to give students a hands-on experience with different aspects of working in a team on a problem. We discuss several issues that should be considered in designing such module as a part of a curriculum: team formation, team communication, team assessment, problem statement and assignment, development process and team supervision. We outline several different alternatives, analyse their pros and cons and describe our approach and related experiences.