2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Student Teamwork Experience in a Hands-on Robotics Course

Presented at Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI) Best Papers

Effective teamwork is powerful and beneficial, especially in multidisciplinary robotics projects and courses. In an undergraduate robotics project-based course, students typically come from diverse backgrounds and work together in teams to achieve a common design goal on robotic platforms. In this complete work, we study the changes in students’ mastery experience through various stages of a hands-on robotics course, with the goal of understanding and facilitating the students’ learning and collaborative experience.

We address the following two specific research questions:
RQ1: As the robotic project complexity advances, how do students’ knowledge, confidence, and teamwork dynamics progress?
RQ2: How are students’ mastery experiences and team satisfaction related to their reported confidence in robotics projects?

This paper looks at a third-year hands-on undergraduate robotic course at a large Midwestern University with a heavy team collaboration component. This course develops full-stack autonomous navigation and mapping for mobile robots and includes both hardware and software design. The goal of the course is to introduce students to multiple sensor systems and real-world mobile robot platforms and to promote teamwork while giving the students confidence and knowledge in building, implementing, and testing their robot functions.

In this work, we leverage Tandem, an educational tool designed to support student teams. We analyze the students’ teamwork effectiveness, confidence, and team performance through both Tandem survey data and quantitative project evaluation in the robotics course. We explore the relationship between the students’ confidence in a robotic project and their project performance (e.g., whether confidence rises before or after a project milestone, and the correlation between project performance and team satisfaction). We also study the changes in the students’ teamwork experience as the robotic project complexity grows, with the hope that this work may provide some insights on improving student team experience as we design and plan future multidisciplinary robotics projects and courses.

Authors

Dr. Xiaoxiao Du University of Michigan [biography]

Xiaoxiao Du is a Lecturer and Adjunct Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan. She teaches robotics courses and supervises multidisciplinary teams and design experiences. She is interested in promoting student learning and team collaboration through innovative curricular design and data-informed evaluation.
Dr. Robin Fowler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6161-0986 University of Michigan [biography]

Robin Fowler is a Technical Communication lecturer and a Engineering Education researcher at the University of Michigan. Her teaching is primarily in team-based engineering courses, and her research focuses on equity in communication and collaboration as well as in group design decision making (judgment) under uncertainty. She is especially interested in how power relationships and rhetorical strategies affect group judgment in engineering design; one goal of this work is to to understand factors that inhibit full participation of students who identify with historically marginalized groups and investigate evidence-based strategies for mitigating these inequities. In addition, she is interested in technology and how specific affordances can change the ways we collaborate, learn, read, and write. Teaching engineering communication allows her to apply this work as she coaches students through collaboration, design thinking, and design communication. She is part of a team of faculty innovators who originated Tandem (tandem.ai.umich.edu), a tool designed to help facilitate equitable and inclusive teamwork environments.
Dr. Laura K Alford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3610-5483 University of Michigan [biography]

Laura K. Alford is a Lecturer IV at the University of Michigan. She researches ways to use data-informed analysis of students' performance and perceptions of classroom environment to support DEI-based curricula improvements.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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