2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete evidence-based practice paper addresses one means to increase the responsibility, and thus learning, of individual team members when completing a team-based project.

For years engineering programs have focused on the importance of students participating in team experiences within the subject and capstone classes. This team experience need was emphasized by ABET in its Criteria 3 – Student Outcomes, specifically outcome d (for years 2000 to 2019) and outcome 5 (for years 2019 to present) and emphatically adopted by most engineering programs. The need for teamwork is also emphasized by industry. However, some faculty have found that, due to this large emphasis on completing team-based projects, individual student project experiences have decreased. In addition, faculty have observed that much of the technical work on student team-based projects is completed by a subset of the team members. This results in the possibility that some students are completing courses without practicing or illustrating competence in a technical area.

Since the mid-2000s freshman level engineering students at the University of XXX have participated in a course that introduces them to the engineering design process, customer interaction, technical communication, and project management. The course evolved over time but has always required a customer-supported service-based team project as its culminating experience. Presently the course provides each team of 4 to 6 students a customer for which they develop a deliverable physical device that aids the customer or users, who may have one or more disabilities, to be independent in their life and/or learning. Student teams are multidisciplinary. They consist of mechanical and computer engineering, mechatronics technology, and environmental science students.
During the culminating project students work through the engineering design process of identifying the project, understanding the project needs and criteria, developing conceptual designs, analyzing and testing design appropriateness and capabilities, determining final solution, building and testing solution, and delivering solution. Prior to Fall 2020, student teams, through a guided process, determined among themselves how they would work within their teams to meet the goal of producing and delivering the final product. Since Fall 2020, however, individual team members are now required to prototype and test functional concepts of the possible final design prior to final build. This is done to ensure that each student participates in the prototyping and testing phases of the design process. The goals are that each student will experience the learning that comes from hands on testing and each team will ensure testing of concepts prior to solidifying final designs.

As part of this process each team member is required to report – in memorandum format and in an oral presentation – their prototype design, device, test procedure, and test results. They submit their work to the instructor and share their results with their team members. At the end of the semester the students reflect, using an online survey, on the role the individual prototyping and testing experience played in their (1) contribution to the team, (2) learning of technical matter, and (3) confidence in working a design project in the future.
This paper reports on the student responses to the reflection. In addition, it reports on the evaluation by the instructor, using the individual memorandums and team final reports, of the ability of each team member to (1) complete an effective prototype build and test and (2) to contribute to the final product design.