Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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each member of the team (including his/her participation), and identify the key aspects
that should be modified next time. This individual feedback which has no effect in the
grade is made as a part of the project post-mortem activity. Below we can see some
examples of these messages.
“your participation in the project received the following perception of your team
members”:
“He lacks communication with the team but he fulfilled his tasks” (2.5/5; 4/5; 3.5/5)
“He participates in the project, but without engagement and initiative” (5/5; 3.7/5;
3.5/5)
“He was as a team´s head; His participation was active, with ideas and responsibility”
(4.5/5; 4.2/5)
For the oral communication, we have different sources of assessment:
• Students themselves (sometimes individually, sometimes in teams) do a cross
evaluation
• External invited experts (graduate students, and professors)
• Teaching team
In the written communication, the assessment (and feedback) is made by the teaching
team.
At the end of the course we ask the students directly about their perception of the
contribution of each main activity to their team work and communication skills. They say
that the contribution of the “Endurance project” is greater than the “sprint projects” for
the team work. They ask for more support to enhance their communication skills and
orientation in order to give continuity to the endurance project.
Comments and conclusions
We described in this paper a project based course for freshman computing engineering
students. The aim of the course is to give an immersion environment to project driven
engineering activity, and to enhance team work, innovation, and communication skills in
the students.
The project activity in the course seeks to provide the student with a wide vision of the
engineering job, based on their student participation in different kinds of projects with
different teams, where practical and active learning occurs throughout the semester.
Students are invited to learn how to plan their resources (mainly their time), also how to
develop in an autonomous way (with the support of the teaching team as a guide) a set of
activities (decide to deepen their knowledge in some specific topics, to consult experts), as
a team, in order to achieve their project´s goals.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011