2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Team formation strategies are an important element of engineering task design for authentic, collaborative projects. Many engineering educators employ software such as CATME to regulate team formation. These programs, which typically focus on demographics and skill levels with the goal of creating productive teams, tend to work at the individual project level and may not necessarily account for students’ participation in a series of multiple projects. Indeed, engaging a classroom community in a series of projects presents the opportunity to strategically pair students such that their connections with peers are maximized over the course of the series. In turn, maximizing these connections may impact the spread of information through the student “network” over time.

Our ongoing work explores the impact of strategic partner assignments in a series of four paired design projects in a required 16-week, 300-level aerospace controls course with an enrollment of 121 undergraduate students. This study builds on previous work [blinded for review] in which we developed and implemented a human-centered engineering design framework at the course level. In this work-in-progress paper, we document our experiences and preliminary findings from tracking partner assignments. In this iteration, pairs for projects one, two, and three were assigned randomly so that each student worked with three different students, with the stipulation that students could name a small number of peers with whom they did not want to work (if applicable). In project four, students had the option to request a previous partner or other peer, but were not required to do so. At the beginning of the semester, the instructor oriented students to the design project structure and expectations. Students were provided with both Word and LaTeX AIAA-compliant templates and instructed to use either one for their technical reports. We observed that pairs’ implementation of the LaTeX template increased from roughly 50% in project one to 100% in project four. In other words, over the course of the four projects, pairs trended toward the universal decision to use the LaTeX template despite the fact that no guidance was provided in the use of LaTeX, a system for document preparation with which the majority of students were unfamiliar at the start of the semester.

We hypothesize that strategic partner assignments led to the universal choice of LaTeX over Word. To test this hypothesis and to better understand the effect of our partner assignments, we use data visualization to inspect the spread of students’ decisions to use either template in each of their four project pairs. We also use excerpts from consented students’ written work (68 males, 10 females) to look more closely at the journeys of individual students through the project sequence. Based on our findings, we anticipate developing a team formation strategy that more deliberately maximizes connections among students and will evaluate the impact of this strategy on trends in students’ decision making. Our ongoing exploration highlights the need for educators to strategically consider connections among students and their potential impact on decision making when organizing multiple collaborative projects.