Team toolbox: activities & suggestions for facilitating project teams

This paper shares the experience of facilitating project design teams and offers practical suggestions and activities for improving workgroup performance. The activities presented here represent a series of mini-lectures and class exercises used to promote team development in a yearlong engineering project design course for first-year students. These short activities are useful in engaging college students and getting them to examine the effectiveness of their own teams. Attention is paid to group process, with different activities throughout the project design cycle, from icebreakers at team inception through reflection on strengths and areas for improvement at project completion. Included in this paper are semi-structured exercises for many various situations, including increasing communication, examining group norms, managing conflict, providing guidelines for creative brainstorming, monitoring team progress, and utilizing strengths of all team members. The information offered here is intended to give fresh ideas to those who work with teams so that they may more easily and confidently incorporate a focus on group process into project design courses.