(521f) “Think like an Expert”. an Engaging in-Class Activity for Sustainable Engineering Courses

Team building games are effective strategies to develop communication, teamwork, and leadership skills [1]. They rank among the top skills demanded by industry for new professionals. In-class activities developing these skills in curricular college courses enrich the formation of students in this direction and offer great potential to engage them in effective collaboration and reflect on their experiential-based learning. The activity reported here aimed to provide students with an experience to realize the value of communication, negotiation, leadership, and teamwork, based on previous technical knowledge acquired during the course, but open to uncertainties and opinion. The activity was developed and tested in an elective course for junior and senior students on green chemical engineering and sustainability [2]. The activity provided students with the attractive feature of approaching experts’ qualified opinion about main topics explored in the course. It was based on a yearly survey that the life insurance institution AXA has been performing since 2014. AXA requests from experts and general population around the world to rank the top 10 future world risks (including themes like climate change, cybersecurity, energy risks, pollution, etc.). For the 2023 edition (published in October), they obtained responses from 3,500 experts and over 22,000 individuals (public). The combination of the final two lists resulted in 12 top future risks (8 were common in the expert and public lists). Students were presented with this final selection of 12 themes and were asked to build their own ranking, without having information on the reported rankings. Students were given 10 minutes to select their top 10 choices individually, with no communication to other students. After that first selection, they were paired and requested to decide on a common ranking by consensus or heads-and-tails as alternative method. Students were given 10 minutes for this second phase. In a third round the pairs were arranged in teams of 5-6 members (the same teams they had been working projects for the course during the entire semester), and requested to get the team’s top-10 list by consensus, vote or heads-and-tails, always favoring consensus, and recording the decision method, for another 10 minutes. Finally, the entire class was assigned with the task of selecting the class’ top-10 list for another 10 minutes. Students were invited to take leadership roles in order to guarantee the completion of the list on time. The final part of the activity asked students to compare each list (individual, pair, team, class) with the experts’ selection. Points were awarded or subtracted depending on the proximity of the student selections to the experts’ rank. Results showed a consistent improvement with increasing dialogue and negotiation, from the individual step to the whole class performance, with a net improvement of 4 points (in the scale of 1-12) by this evolution in teamwork. All the student lists averaged better than the public list when compared with expert selection, as a more informed segment of the population, derived from their formation in the course. The activity was executed as the concluding class for the course, provided a wrap-up opportunity for selected main topics, and clearly demonstrated the efficacy of collaboration, communication, and teamwork.

[1] Reference to be provided after approval to keep the anonymity of authors during the process.

[2] Reference to be provided after approval to keep the anonymity of authors during the process.

[3] AXA Future Risks Report 2023. https://www.axa.com/en/news/2023-future-risks-report