Platform to support creative teams in complex learning projects

Abstract

This article presents a web platform for project-based learning, which supports the composition of students’ teams and the collaboration between teams’ members throughout the project lifecycle, in the context of existent groupware tools. The students’ distribution in teams can be made manually or automatically, taking into account the skill inventory created by the tutor and filled by each student: the objective is to foster the diversity of profiles inside a team, thus stimulating creative thinking and obtaining optimally equilibrated teams. A case study is provided for systems engineering projects, which have a special statute due to their complexity. Unlike other academic disciplines, systems engineering requires interdisciplinary knowledge related to various engineering areas, but also business and soft skills.