2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teamwork remains an essential yet persistently underdeveloped competency in engineering and STEM education. Although collaborative projects are widely embedded across curricula, students often struggle to internalize how effective teams form, communicate, navigate conflict, and sustain accountability. These challenges have been amplified in post-pandemic learning environments, where expectations around engagement and professionalism have shifted. At the same time, workforce demands increasingly emphasize collaboration across diverse teams, with recent industry reports highlighting gaps in graduates’ teamwork readiness. These trends underscore the need for structured, experiential approaches that explicitly develop teamwork processes while fostering innovation-oriented thinking.

This study presents the design, implementation, and multi-site evaluation of Team Mode Unlocked, a gamified role-play workshop that integrates Tuckman’s stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing) with key dimensions of entrepreneurial thinking, including creativity, opportunity recognition, stakeholder empathy, and value creation. The workshop was implemented with faculty participants, who assumed hidden teammate archetypes designed to surface common collaboration challenges while working under time constraints to address a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-aligned design challenge. The activity culminates in a one-minute venture pitch requiring teams to synthesize ideas and articulate value.

The workshop was implemented across four contexts, including the United States, Portugal, and Türkiye, with faculty participants (n = 10–60 per session) representing diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. Using a qualitative-dominant case study approach, data were collected through behavioral observations, facilitator field notes, and post-session surveys. Observed behaviors were analyzed using Tuckman’s framework to examine communication, conflict navigation, role negotiation, and coordination.

Findings indicate that the workshop accelerates early-stage team development, making teamwork processes visible and actionable within a short timeframe. Faculty participants reported increased ability to leverage diverse contributions, navigate team dysfunction, and engage in innovation-driven collaboration, while also identifying opportunities to transfer the approach into their own teaching contexts. Ultimately, Team Mode Unlocked illustrates how gamified, cross-cultural teamwork experiences can cultivate the mindsets and behaviors essential to engineering leadership in an increasingly global and innovation-driven world.