2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Building a complex multi-systems engineering project required coordination between individuals from different engineering disciplines (Jonassen et al., 2006; Trevelyan & Tilli, 2007). To help K-12 students learn how to work in real engineering environments and prepare for the future, it was important to teach them how to coordinate and organize their projects (Pleasants & Olson, 2019). To support K-12 students working on systems engineering projects and help develop their systems thinking skills, we developed and implemented a project management board (Brennan et al., 2023) along with methods designed to aid students in completing various tasks and collaborating on a large-scale project. In February 2024, we ran a workshop with 13 elementary school students during a school break camp in Massachusetts, where they worked together to build a Smart Model of a City over four consecutive days. The students were divided into five sub-teams—Power, Roads, Buildings, Vehicles, and Trains—and then collaborated to integrate their builds into one cohesive Smart City.

On the third day of the project, we asked four students, one from each group, to meet in a separate room to come up with tasks for the entire project. In this paper, we focused on the task development group’s conversation and design process to analyze how students worked within this group, shared ideas, and coordinated with other team members to assign tasks to both subgroups and the class as a whole. Additionally, we observed students having high motivation, everyone focusing on their duty and remaining engaged.

Based on our initial analysis, we found that the structure of the systems engineering project and the use of the project board supported students in developing their coordination and organizing skills. We found that: 1) students were able to coordinate, define their roles, stay focused, and complete their duties with less teacher supervision; 2) students from different subgroups were able to sit together, share, and listen to each other, understand the other teams’ roles in the overall project, and collaborate effectively as a new group to design new tasks; and 3) students in the task development group successfully negotiated and assigned tasks for their subgroups. This approach allowed students to apply their knowledge and solve complex problems together. In situations where there was too much material to teach all students, rather than covering every topic in depth, this method supported students' teamwork and shared understanding, preparing them for real-world collaborative problem-solving.