Teamwork assessment in order to promote engineering students innovative attitude

This paper presents an outline of the evaluation of the active learning taking place in an engineering course1 in the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. The course intends to contribute to the development of the innovative attitude of Systems and Computing Engineering and Industrial Engineering students (average age is 20), through the development of competences such as: - Engineering teamwork - Effective communication in engineering processes - Engineering systems design - Management of engineering projects Throughout the course the students work in interdisciplinary teams (5 students each). Each team has the following of the teachers (One Computing Engineering professor and one Industrial engineering professor) and one member of the entrepreneurs staff (ICT leaders). Each team should propose and develop an engineering project based on ICT innovation. This course is inspired on the CDIO proposal (Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate), with a particular emphasis in one additional first step: the Observe step. The OCDIO steps (observation, conception, design, implementation and operation) of the project are developed during two academic semesters. At the end of this process, the teams present their project in a fair that’s open for the business public and in a contest. The winners of the contest continue the next year with the implementation of the project [1]. So far, 20 groups have participated each semester and there have been 4 winning teams (20 students). We tried to assess the teamwork evolution along the process and its relation with the innovation attitude. In order to achieve this, we’ve had gathered information from the entrepreneurs, teachers and students who, through observation tools, have allowed us to define indicators related to teamwork. For the analysis we have relied on the different evaluation instances (oral presentations, papers, the fair, and the contest), the tools we have designed (surveys), and video recordings of different processes.