2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The importance of working in teams throughout the engineering education curriculum has been well documented in research. Therefore, most engineering curricula conclude with a team-based capstone design course. This study is inspired by such a course, where students work in multidisciplinary teams for two semesters in designing, building, and testing projects. The objective is to evaluate the process of students’ self-placement in team roles and the impact of these roles on their engagement and perception of success during the project development experience, to investigate how student role placement, rotation and execution contribute to their development of leadership and teamwork skills. Results are presented from a mixed methods survey and data from three cohorts of students between 2021 and 2023, including questions on the students’ course goals, role assignments, role rotations, and if their roles affected their engagement, success, or team’s success. Most respondents started the year driven by the opportunity to gain experience and by the end of the course showed satisfaction with the opportunities for role placement, execution, and their individual and team success, though many had shifted to also be performance driven. The results encourage the strategy of allowing teams to define, assign, and determine the rotations of their roles, and the importance of conducting periodic assessments on their practices throughout the year to ensure fairness and success.