2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The long process of educating a new generation of engineers requires more than just the progressive accumulation of classes as students move through a departmental curriculum. Engineering education goes beyond solving equations and retaining systematic procedures. It requires cultivating ethical values, honing creative skills in engineering, working collaboratively and iteratively, and solving complex problems in a multidisciplinary environment. The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) formally acknowledged the importance of these notions in their most recent requirements - (students’ outcome 5): “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.”
Project-based teamwork is particularly crucial in a first-year engineering design course. An experiential learning environment promotes acquiring essential skills and abilities that will be used in future projects throughout their education. In addition, multidisciplinary teams cultivate a respectful and inclusive work environment, support a deeper understanding of engineering concepts, and encourage students to apply these concepts to meaningful solutions to engineering problems while nurturing a healthy and interactive classroom environment.
This Work in Progress paper describes the design and implementation of a semester-long project as part of the first-year design class at the University of Connecticut and how it promoted teamwork on multilevel. The class had over 400 first-year engineering students (from all engineering fields except computing) divided into 16 multidisciplinary sections, all working in the First-Year Design Laboratory. Students in each section were further divided into smaller groups of 4-5 students using the guidelines on equitable teams and inclusion discussed in the lectures. The ten-week project emphasized improved collaboration and teamwork through iterative design-and-build cycles of a "Solar-powered Martian habitat" at multiple scales: small (4~5 student group) and medium (6~7 group habitat communities). The project involved students in smaller groups working collaboratively on individual components of the habitat, such as a solar-driven dwelling, a carport, a rover, a solar tree, a bridge, and machinery. Students acted as “residents” living together, designing each component to accommodate the needs of their own and other teams and contributing towards the habitat. Finally, the smaller groups integrated their components and collaborated to maximize the energy efficiency and performance of the Solar-powered Habitat.
The assessments of this project were designed for each level of teamwork: 1) Students highlighted their contributions through an Engineering Portfolio. 2) Smaller groups reflected on their design and building process by submitting weekly engineering logs and a semester-end poster. Finally, 3) Each group habitat (comprising 5~6 groups) presented its energy-efficient habitat design in the first-year design expo at the end of the semester. The ongoing data collection of this effort on project-based, multidisciplinary, multilevel teamwork proved how this project design effectively cultivated better teamwork practices across all engineering fields.