2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This evidence-based complete paper explores the feasibility of developing an interactive platform with chatbot feature to facilitate project-based learning. Teamwork pedagogy is widely used in engineering courses, particularly in first year (cornerstone) and senior-year (capstone) design courses, but also across the curriculum. Faculty have several aims for teaching in teams, one of which is to improve students' collaborative abilities. Engineering expertise, as well as pedagogical goals such as greater learning and motivation, are under consideration when building an effective team pedagogy. CATME, and other platforms have long been used to facilitate the process of monitoring team performance. The comprehensive data that the platform provided has enabled faculty members to analyze the problems in detail. Also, it is very helpful when documenting the team performance from year to year. In the large private institution located in the Northeast Region of the US, 700 students are taking a fundamental engineering course on an annual basis. The students are asked to form project teams after the first two weeks and work on a semester-long project on a weekly basis. Overall, there are 50-60 teams each semester. CATME has been implemented to monitor the team’s progress. It has been reported by the faculty members that it took time to evaluate the students’ peer comments and ratings as there are 2000 - 3000 comments each semester. Human errors can also occur when reviewing those comments. To reduce the workload of faculty members for analyzing the student comments and taking actions accordingly, an interactive team-monitoring platform is built to serve the purpose. This platform consists of two major components, which is built on React and Fast API. The platform can potentially be integrated with CATME or other team-monitoring software. A group of CATME users were asked to try out the platform and fill in a user experience survey. The survey results gave some constructive feedback for the developers. Overall, the project can deliver a feasible solution for course instructors to handle many student project teams. In the future, a generative AI feature - CHATME will also be available on the front end to help the user check the status of each student group, which is built using NLTK and TensorFlow. Moreover, if a team issue arises, the platform will alert the users, and provide constructive suggestions on how to improve the group performance.