2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 366: Relationship Between Team-Building Activities and Capstone Team Performance and Student Experience

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Team building activities are popular interventions during early stages of team development. At [university], in the multidisciplinary capstone course with an average cohort size of around 350, the students on a particular capstone project team may not be mutually acquainted and thus may benefit from such team building activities. Prior literature has studied the effectiveness of various instructor-directed team building activities on student teams. However, our students are generally eager to spend class time working on their projects and often see in-class activities as a distraction rather than an important part of their growth. Instead, the student teams are now allowed to choose an intervention based on team consensus. In this paper, the relationship between attributes of the chosen intervention and student performance, as measured using a series of AACU VALUE rubrics, was studied using statistical measures.

The analysis revealed a statistically significant effect of type of team building activity on teamwork, oral communication, and design & problem solving scores of individual students on the team. Also, a statistically significant effect of location of team building activity (on or off campus) on design & problem solving score was observed.

Authors

Hrushikesh Godbole Rochester Institute of Technology [biography]

Hrushikesh Godbole holds an undergraduate degree in Production Engineering and a masters degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is currently a graduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology pursuing a PhD in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. Prior to starting the PhD program, he has gained five years of industry experience developing new products in the smart lighting industry performing various roles including product management, engineering and operations. His research interests include systems engineering, product design process and engineering education.
Dr. Elizabeth A. Debartolo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6256-8086 Rochester Institute of Technology [biography]

Elizabeth A. DeBartolo, PhD is the Director of the Multidisciplinary Senior Design Program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where students from Biomedical, Computer, Electrical, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering work together on multidisciplinary projects. She is active in the national Capstone Design Community, and received her BSE in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from Duke University and her MS and PhD from Purdue University.
Shun Takai Northern Illinois University [biography]

Dr. Shun Takai is an associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Engineering Technology at Northern Illinois University. He received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. and M.A. degrees from Stanford University, and a B.E. degree from Kyoto University in Japan. Prior to his current position, he worked as a manufacturing plant engineer and as an assistant manager for Sumitomo Metal Industries (1988–1999) in Amagasaki, Japan. His research interests include product life-cycle engineering, which involves customer needs analysis, design team formation, and concurrent design of product, process, and production.

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