We have implemented a jigsaw framework in our biomedical engineering capstone design course by overlaying strategic consideration groups across our design teams. Collaboration in design courses is usually focused within a design team with some peer feedback, but opportunities to work across teams are often limited. The purpose of this teaching tip…

A required undergraduate computer science 15-week project course at North Carolina State University, Department of Computer Science, USA, has grown rapidly in 29 years from serving 3 student teams to up to 39 teams. To maintain the integrity of the award-winning program and to facilitate the collaboration of hundreds of students in an academic…

This article examines teammates' perceptions of individual expert and referent power (personal power) in student teams working on a semester-long project. In our study, we found a positive relationship between being perceived as high in personal power (expert and referent power) by teammates and faculty advisor-rated performance, measured by…

This orientation session was designed to prepare students for their final MBA Capstone project, leverage lessons learned from graduates, transfer prior learning about teams and project management, and launch consulting projects with actual clients. Companies have used orientation sessions to onboard new employees for many years to improve…

Teamwork skills are an important part of business school curriculum typically taught using project-based experiential methods. This paper presents best practices for teaching teamwork skills to Gen Z students using a project-based learning, peer mentoring approach. With experiential learning theory as a guide, an interdisciplinary process was…

The gap between industry needs and engineering graduates' competences is being tackled by project-based courses, which also help to develop key innovation competences to address current societal challenges. Nevertheless, there is limited understanding about what innovation competences are developed through the different types of project-based…

Scrum is a widely-used framework in industry, so many schools apply it to their software engineering courses, particularly capstone courses. Due to the differences between students and industrial professionals, changing Scrum is necessary to fit capstone projects. In this paper, we suggest a decision-making process to assist instructors in…

Capstone projects are common in undergraduate programmes, providing students with a culminating educational experience designed to draw on the knowledge and skills accumulated over the course of their studies. While there are many benefits to capstone projects, they are not without challenges. In particular, when these projects are conducted in…

Just as there is a tension between business professors' practice of assigning team projects, especially in capstone courses, and students' inclination to avoid them, there is also a tension between students' desire to choose their own teammates and professors' belief that they can do a better job of team creation. Professors have learned that when…

Universities face challenges in developing new programs that satisfy students, employers, faculty and administrators, and accreditors. In designing a master in real estate degree, stakeholders desired field-based learning experiences providing significant opportunities for real estate students to develop and apply academic concepts, give…

Scholarship of Application. Background: Capstone courses constitute the culminating experience in engineering curricula. A core characteristic is the student team and project-based nature, with many team deliverables. The ensuing difficulty is to fairly assess the individual team member's contribution toward the team effort. Contribution: The…

Many computer science programs have capstone experiences or project courses that allow students to integrate knowledge from the full breadth of their major. Such capstone projects may be student-designed, instructor-designed, designed in conjunction with outside companies, or integrated with ongoing free and open source (FOSS) projects. The…

To prepare graduates for today's work environment, they must be immersed in positive (and perhaps negative) small group experiences in their courses, which will in turn provide a basic understanding of how teams form and develop over time. In the fall of 2009, we started exploring how software development teams form and interact in a computer…

Employers require software engineers to work in teams when developing software systems. It is therefore important for graduates to have experienced teamwork before they enter the job market. We describe an experiential learning exercise that we designed to teach the software engineering process in conjunction with teamwork skills. The underlying…

This paper discusses the development of a MIS (Management Information Systems) capstone course in an adult graduate information technology program at Johns Hopkins University (Maryland). Rather than focusing on a technology topic, the course provides an environment that allows students to apply the information and skills that they have obtained in…