2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This WIP research paper is part of a larger project that examines students’ perspectives on their experiences and learning during an engineering capstone course. Engineering capstones are an experiential learning course where students collaborate with their peers to solve a challenge for a real-world client, using learning from their previous degree courses. This study explores students’ early learning about teamwork during multiple sections of a capstone course through spoken reflection data. Each capstone instructor implemented different team-building activities. This paper answers the research questions of what engineering students identify as important teamwork skills and how they want to improve team collaborations after experiencing different team-building activities in a capstone course. The qualitative reflective data is rich in detail and is examined through the framework of the Attributes of Effective Teams [1] to see which attributes students identified in each course section. The full project will continue to examine the long-term differences in team collaborations between teams and across sessions. The implications from this study are gaining an understanding what teamwork skills are prioritized by engineering skills early in a capstone course and exploring if certain types of activities are associated with developing different collaboration competencies.

[1] T. Chowdhury and H. Murzi, “Literature Review: Exploring Teamwork in Engineering Education,” presented at the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Jul. 2019..