2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As group-based learning and team projects continue their recent surge in engineering education, there is still significant debate on effective pedagogies associated with teaching project teams. How student teams are formed and evaluated are key decisions instructors must make, all the while balancing important aspects such as team diversity, alignment with learning outcomes, and the quality of the team’s work. What is often missing from the literature around student teaming is the distinction between academic settings and the environments students will experience in professional settings. This omission is problematic when juxtaposed to the motivation behind much of educators' work: to better prepare engineering students for the profession of engineering. If classroom settings continue to be just that, students will continue to be ill-equipped for their transitions into the workforce. This paper tests a unique approach to student team formation, reflective journaling, and final grading by mimicking certain aspects of the professional setting in the classroom – especially as it relates to team formation, project management, and feedback. This work builds on a previous work-in-progress paper that merged design thinking, leadership, and engineering into a cohesive origami engineering course.