Work in Progress - Automated Discourse Interventions and Student Teaming

The ability to successfully work in teams is a crucial part of an engineer\´s workplace success. Engineering education can be improved through a better understanding of how effective teamwork develops. A (patent pending) software tool that "listens" to team conversations and generates automatic interventions into team discourse can effectively mimic the actions of a skilled facilitator. Automated facilitation tools may help students improve their team skills by providing a simplified model for conversational interventions, which students can readily imitate. This paper describes this tool and presents preliminary findings from student reactions to the tool\´s use