(259c) Teamwork Skills Improved By in-Class Team Building Games in Chemical Engineering Lab Courses

Teamwork skills rank at the top of the list for employer’s demands of professional abilities for new hirings and further in the career. Chemical engineering curricula at many universities provide for extensive teamwork skills development by including team projects in several courses, most distinctively at capstone design courses. This training provides students with some confidence and references for approaching their work in industry and academia. However, these experiences are mainly based on requesting students to act together to complete some complex tasks (assignment, project, presentation, etc.). ABET Criterion 3 Outcome 5 requests from accredited programs to document that students develop “an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.” Some efforts have been reported on providing students with instructional content on team work, performance, and leadership to meet these requirements. However, there is limited evidence on the efficacy of these approaches. In our experience, students usually limit themselves to the “divide and conquer” strategy of distributing tasks for results to be assembled generally close to the due dates. Valuable tools like team contract, planning spreadsheets, progress monitoring, log books, leadership strategies, and synergistic communications are frequently missed. Some of these concepts, even if introduced in first-year programs, do not carry lasting impacts throughout the curricula. We have introduced in-class team games, specifically addressing important teamwork skills, as engaging activities to reinforce key components of effective team performance. This paper reports the experience of one of these team games with laboratory courses for sophomores (52), juniors (61), and seniors (71). Quantitative results are analyzed by scorecards and reflections by students to assess the impact of this active learning strategy. They also provided a valuable source for developing new team games addressing the weaknesses and problems detected by students and instructors.